Anno was 19 in 1945. When the Japanese army lowered its conscription age, he found himself one of the last recruits into the Second World War. In one interview he spoke about what was called the ‘military-spirit injection rod,’ a short and heavy wooden bat used by officers to keep their inferiors in order. ‘We were lined up and beaten with it one by one.’

He became a primary school teacher after the war, then began making books—which read like the spiritual opposite of a military-spirit injection rod. Perhaps there had been so much manufactured hatred and manufactured heroism that he could not bring himself to invest his books with conventional protagonists and meanings. The refusal to overexplain is lodged well beneath the surface of the books.

The books may be wordless, but our experience of reading them definitely isn’t. Ren expects plenty of conversation about what happens on each page.

In fact, one way she learned to count was by reading Anno’s Counting Book, which begins with a snowy landscape. Then across twelve spreads a town appears, one tree and one house and one bird at a time. The book doesn’t announce the correspondence, and I’ve learned to let her wonder about the proliferation of things rather than march her up the ladder of numbers.

Counting is a way of coming into contact with things in the world, not just an abstract skill.

A good picture book reminds us that there’s something playful in the act of paying attention. It can be useful to separate the day into functional chunks: time to eat, time to sleep, time to get dressed, time to play, time for a chore, and the transitions in between. Sometimes I approach my time with Ren with this mindset, trying to coach her from one block to the next. But play is not just another chunk. For her it is sustained through them all.

Splitting reality into compartments, then running a line through them—that’s my problem, not hers. The reader of Anno’s books is freed from—or deprived of, if you prefer—scanning the page from left to right. We flick left to right, and just as easily we turn from right to left. The books are designed to make this playfulness possible. The beginning might be the end, or the end the beginning, or the middle may be where we first land.

For all the beauty and pleasure in Anno’s books, I also reach for them out of mundane frustrations. I speak and read to the kids only in Cantonese; I’m tired by the end of the day, and don’t want to translate another book from English.

I feel relieved. Even before she is fighting me on language, as I’m sure she will, I spare myself a skirmish with the English language.

Her journey to language has been full of delight—for her, and for us. The sadder underbelly has been watching her Cantonese regress, at least in comparative terms. Many parents have their own version of this, and have to decide when to persist and when to let go. I’m far from giving up, and nor do I intend to make fighting my kids the main motif of my relationship with them.

Anno’s books often depict a bygone, pre-industrial world, and I already sense the danger of nostalgia when it comes to the kids: overidentification with a time when they appeared to be innocent, before they spoke up, before language.

I’d like to think that appreciating the wordless pages is more than anticipatory nostalgia. Nostalgia works by closing the mind onto a fixed moment. A good story opens a door to reality.

Language is important—it will mediate most of my relationship with her, and most of the rest of her life. But it is neither the beginning nor the end of living. There’s always something beyond. As he said about his series of books about travels abroad: ‘it is difficult for me to understand the languages of the western world, still I can understand the hearts of the people.’

Wordless books are not anti-word. They just create a softer terrain on which to explore, without a zero-sum tradeoff between one language or another. They feel non-coercive to me, like many directions are possible. How long can parents hold off from pushing their kids into a corner if they themselves feel backed into one?

Bilingual books are also part of our roster, and they work too. A slight difference is that with them, I still have to choose one language over another.

Jo and I have been talking about the need for concision in speaking with a toddler. A few words too many and you’ve lost them.

It’s also true that Ren is happiest when she has the time and space to explore, to rove, to lose herself in unexpected details. To revel in the proliferation of things.

Compression and dilation each have a place in childhood, as in great storytelling.

A picture book is a tiny and concise form; it cannot assume much patience of its readers and listeners. In one sense, Anno’s wordless books take this form to its limit. But they are not minimalist. Like a Bruegel painting, they contain more detail than the eye can take in. Some of them are made of optical illusions, but even those that don’t, like these spreads from Anno’s Journey, only reveal themselves over many sittings.

I can see Ren puzzling over two things that are both true: that her attention is finite and that reality is not. We all struggle to hold those truths, it’s just that kids haven’t learned to paper over the difficulty. Be puzzled with the child, Anno said.

Subscribe now

Share

Lucas

Laura, we were talking about why we first met you. Above all we wanted not to approach this recent birth from a position of fear. I wonder whether that’s a common reason people come to you—dealing with fears, spoken or unspoken.

Laura

Absolutely. Over time, I’ve come to specialise a bit in helping people who’ve had a previous difficult birth, whether physically, psychologically, spiritually. The reason I’ve chosen to specialise in that is because I love it so much. I love to see the transformation of someone who is daring to hope that birth can be different from last time. Just the intention of getting in touch with what we want and taking small planning steps towards achieving that—but mostly just daring to believe that it could be—is a step towards making it real. It’s not just that the damage from the previous birth is taken away, it’s that the experience becomes a source of strength for the person or the family going forward—it can be healing not just in the sense of undoing something but of remaking life in a new shape.

Jo

You gave me that absolutely. You really helped me ground myself in that feeling and take back what agency there is in birth, which is also about a process of surrendering. I wonder how you help women find that balance between letting go of something you can’t control and holding onto agency?

Laura

For anyone who’s not familiar with the patterns of birth—the first stage is a period of the uterus contracting; the second stage comes after the cervix is fully dilated, and it brings different sensations of involuntary bearing down, the uterus now pushes the baby down to achieve birth. Between those stages there’s a time where almost universally we feel we cannot go on — we feel we’re being utterly undone. We often say at that moment, “I can’t do this.” But what is it that we can’t do? We don’t have any choice. We can’t delegate this experience, we can’t stop it. What we’re really saying is not that I can’t do this—because you are doing it, clearly, in the very moment you say it—but that I can’t go on clinging to my old self. Something is being undone, something is changing. It’s like the egg cracking: a new person is being born, not just the baby but also the mother. That’s the moment we come face to face with the fact that it’s being done in us—it’s not something we are doing—and yet it’s exactly the moment when we get to do something about it.

There’s something mysterious there: the moment we come to the end of our strength, and realise there’s nothing to be done, that it’s simply happening to me, is exactly the moment when our true agency is expressed. I often say to someone going through that real crunch that the sensations they’re experiencing are huge, but they’re not bigger than them, and they can never be bigger than them—because they’re coming from inside them.

Lucas

One of the very beautiful chapters in your book called “Thinning,” where you introduce this idea of a thin place from Celtic Christianity—a kind of membrane between heaven and earth. We all have all kinds of psychological mechanisms that help us deny that we’re in a thin place, because it’s very uncomfortable to be in one. There’s a difference between the register of your book, which is theologically inflected, and your work as a doula, where you’re less explicit about the faith dimension. Is it possible to be in the thin place without the religious terminology; are people on different paths to the same place?

Laura

I tend to think of pregnancy and childbirth as a universal experience, and a time of profound openness. I’ve been privileged to witness people go through some quite profound transformations—by which I don’t mean they suddenly converted or came to see things with exactly the vocabulary I would use. I think it’s almost part of the design of how we become parents: we have to become thin in order to give birth. On a physical level, the cervix is becoming thin in preparation for labour; spiritually that happens too, where we sense our human vulnerability, realise how dependent we are on the people around us and their kindness and the circumstances of life. And that’s a profound asset for parenting too, because we’re remaking our lives in a new form that incorporates the existence of some other creature, completely vulnerable and dependent on us. So I see the thinness as a kind of undoing, a precursor to the remaking we then get to do to make a family.

Can I quote Jo? In the first conversation we had, you said something I will never forget, because it put words to this universal experience so beautifully. You said that when you were giving birth before, even though aspects of that experience were very difficult, you felt as if the well-guarded secrets of the universe were being whispered in your ear. That stays with me as something that gives a universal language to what I experience in theological terms — and it showed me that whatever our faith background, whatever our religious background, if any, there is this shared experience, which you put those beautiful words to.

Jo

This also touches on something I wanted to discuss with you. There’s a chapter of your book about death—which you had mentioned in the birth-stages discussion, where the baby is coming into existence, but so is the mother. That’s something I really struggled with, and found I was quite resistant to—that so many of my most transcendental or sublime experiences seem to contain their opposite. For the mother to be born, the maiden has to depart; you’re giving a version of yourself over for this next version to arise. And that can be quite a brutal thing to confront.

Laura

Yes—there is grief in that, and even a very peaceful, gentle birth carries this undoing, this brush with death. If you listen only to the teddy bears and the rattles and the pastel-colour side of things, you over-romanticise parenting, and you’d potentially find it a tremendous disappointment. But if you only hear the horror stories—the sleepless nights, the agonising three-day labour, the constant sick on your shoulder—you’d never launch into the experience at all. The blessings and the challenges are actually part of the same experience. For me, the words I’d give to that are that the resurrection not only comes after the death but is actually woven in. It’s the same thing. The death becomes the resurrection. So we can’t separate the incredible highs, where you could do it all again in a heartbeat, from the lows.

Jo

That gives me a totally new way of thinking about the story of the resurrection — the passion as a great metaphor.

Laura

Yes, exactly. The passion is trying to incorporate death and resurrection together. It’s not that the death makes the resurrection possible and then we all live in a rosy universe—it’s that life is intertwined in that way; it’s one experience. We can’t tie these extremes off neatly by rationalising them; they belong together, inherently part of one another. The giving is a self-giving, is a life-giving.

Lucas

Another beautiful chapter is about hospitality—how pregnancy is an act of becoming a home for another person, and in doing so making yourself vulnerable in a way you can’t take back. You don’t get to know in advance who you’re welcoming. How does thinking of pregnancy as a pilgrimage help us sit with that uncertainty?

Laura

We don’t know whether the baby will survive, or whether pregnancy and mourning will become one and the same because we lose the child. We don’t know the child’s genetics, whether there’ll be intensive nursing from us for the rest of our lives—I’ve experienced that in my extended family.

And we don’t know what sort of person we’ll give birth to—maybe they’ll be completely different from us, and we’ll have quite a hard time relating to them. So even opening the door to becoming pregnant, whether intentionally or not, is one degree of separation from some unknown future, completely different from what we might imagine for ourselves. It’s opening ourselves to some wild adventure.

Share

Subscribe now

I remember thinking that Ren seemed surprisingly relaxed and pensive after her birth. That lasted a few hours, before she became the force of nature that she remains today. Ru is coming up to three months and still appears relaxed and pensive. Maybe he’ll be the meditator in the family.

Kai Ru is how we decided to transliterate 啟如. ‘Kai’ is to activate or to awaken. ‘Ru’ is among the most versatile words in Chinese; the character appeared on ox and turtle oracle-bones no later than three millennia ago and its meanings have layered upon each other ever since. Its earliest function was the verb ‘to go’, a later sense was ’to be like’, and the word is still used in those ways today.

The great adventure of the word, and the one we circled around when choosing our son’s name, happened when Buddhism hopped over the Himalayas to China. The translators had to find a way to render the Sanskrit term tathā, and they chose ru. Tathā is an adverb (’thus’) and it is also the chief term by which Mahayana Buddhism names reality as such. That is to say: reality as it is, prior to conceptual elaboration—the other side of the coin from what Buddhists refer to as emptiness.

The child’s mind is perhaps as great a mystery as to themselves as to us. If Ru was a meditator, what would he be meditating upon? The answer may be ‘nothing in particular’, and that would be all the more striking and impressive. ‘No difference between self and other .. we’re all in the soup.’ That’s how Jo quipped about Ru’s attitude the other day.

‘Go forth,’ the parent tells the child. But to activate or to awaken (kai) is not the same as ’to achieve’. The greater the hope, the deeper the delusion. What is a buddha? The Tathāgatagarbha-sūtra has a train of similes to get us thinking. Here are three that I like: honey surrounded by a swarm of bees; a treasure hidden beneath a poor man’s house, of which he is unaware; a golden statue inside a burnt clay mould. Of course I want my child to go forth and seek reality. But what we most want for him must be uncovered, not acquired.

The late Alan Watts was great at giving very funny and somewhat wrong lectures, including one on Zen. I only learned about this one last week, but it would have been fun to read when choosing Ru’s name:

The word, tathata, which is Sanskrit for ‘suchness’ or ‘vastness,’ really means something more like ‘da-da-da,’ based on the word tat, which in Sanskrit means ‘that.’ But da-da is the first sound a baby makes when it comes into the world because the baby looks around and says, ‘da, da, da, da, da.’ ‘That, that, that, that, that!’ Fathers flatter themselves and think their baby is saying ‘da-da’ for ‘daddy,’ but according to Buddhist philosophy all this universe is one da-da-da.

The gall of fatherly delusion. While on leave, I wondered: why write about parenthood? It’s an activity more practical than romantic, at least when young kids are involved; its costs and rewards feel more private than public.

The problem can be framed in the negative. What George Orwell said about writers is probably true of parents too—‘vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.’ Parenthood isn’t altruistic. Like writing, it often augments the ego. One of the best things that can happen to a parent is puncturing one’s self-image, but we all know that delusions love to keep compounding.

My wager is that bringing together these two activities can lay bare what is delusional in each. Orwell wrote that the instinct that drives the writer is ‘for all one knows’ the same as what ‘makes a baby squall for attention.’ Again, ditto for how and why people parent. Most of our habits are staler than last week’s bread. This position makes it difficult for me to give my kids, or you, any advice. That difficulty might just keep us within the orbit of reality.

Many years ago I spent a day at Zhen Ru monastery on top of a mountain in the middle of China. It was the most silent place I have ever been; the kind of quiet that reaches and sits inside you like the thinnest glass vase. At peace with the world he is, but being with Ru is not quite the same as being with a bunch of monks. If attachment is the source of delusion, our delusions may be necessary all the same. The most delusional and the most real meet in what we find loveable.

Sometimes we talk about truth as if it is something we go into the world and find ways to apprehend. There is a simpler and probably older view that truth resides in care. Taking care of others activates (kai) capacities that are often invisible to modern society. For a start, we can describe what this activation looks like. Genuine care may be what distinguishes between fabricating a life and generating one. A strictly first-person perspective has little value in this light. The value lies in a rich but hard-to-articulate form of shared life. Every essay about parenthood is an interpersonal essay.

The tragedy that I see all around is that children often give up on their parents’ capacity for reality. For all kinds of reasons, the relationship stops being truth-bearing. That frightens me. It’s not that I want my kids to tell me everything; it’s that I dread the time when they would deem their parent to be dormant to reality.

So the reality to be awakened is not only in him. It’s also in us. Whether we are prepared to receive it is up to us. Jo and I hadn’t talked much about this circular meaning of Ru’s name before he was born, and I hadn’t put my finger on it until now. That’s fine; we have many years to learn the lesson.

Ru says: reality is not a concept. Parenthood is not a concept. These are ways to be. As I was recently told by a friend, who happens to be childless: parenthood, what an interesting way to be a human.

Subscribe now

Share

Time with a toddler often involves pointing to things in the world and giving them names. The other day at the farm down the road: horse, pig, goat. One indication that the farm welcomes young visitors was the signage—for tractor, then toilet, a practical one in our potty-training era. We got to ‘threshing barn’, and I wasn’t sure how to explain that one.

So far, our two kids have been very different as newborns. Something they share is a vocal preference to be rocked outdoors. When it’s not the right time for a long walk, we pace up and down the patio. We’re lucky to have had two spring babies, who could acclimatise to the world over long summer days.

I usually imagine the lullaby as a bedside genre. But a Cantonese song that I’ve been singing to the kids is very much an outdoor lullaby. It begins: 月光光, 照地堂, radiant moonlight, shining on the threshing ground. It’s set in the yard in front of the house, 地堂, which is used to air out grain—or laundry, or people large and small at the end of a hot day.

The central image of moonlight reminds me of so much Chinese poetry. The moon as conduit between the earthly and the celestial, between past and present, between people across distances. It also reminds me of what every parent knows, that night is not just for sleeping—that it may be the time to take care of tasks left over from the day, or the time to sit with thoughts and feelings, even if the children are asleep. I’m writing this after both kids have gone to bed, for instance.

What does it sound like for the moon to shine on the threshing ground? The sensible answer may be that the moon doesn’t sound like anything. But the song suggests it does. I like this bit of synaesthesia in the first line. Like all great storytelling for children, a good lullaby trusts them to sense the world from the beginning.

Just these past weeks, Ren has begun properly joining in when we sing. Even for songs she doesn’t know well, she comes in at the end of each line. I know I shouldn’t fixate on this too much, but it melts me. It’s embarrassing for a grown person to look expectantly at small children. At its core, parenthood is a one-way street, I keep reminding myself; only fools look for symmetrical reflection in their kids. Still, I’m a happy man if she’s with me before I start the next line.

This lullaby isn’t coy: the child, affectionately called 蝦仔 ‘little shrimp’, is rocked on the threshing ground and asked to fall asleep. That’s just the first request it makes of ‘little shrimp’. The verse lays out a whole map of an agrarian labour cycle that the child will join: grandpa watching the cattle and sheep, grandma weaving fishing nets til dawn.

Indoctrination is too strong. But lullabies are induction songs. Why do we want to integrate children into our vision of life, in the first place, and when is it fair to do so? I don’t mean the agrarian cycle—the closest I get is pulling weeds in the garden. What’s my version of this, if material comfort has removed the subsistence need that the lullaby assumes? The lyrics make me wonder what stories parents today can draw on that connect actions with consequences. The melody convinces me that the music itself is a shared experience, a touch-point from which to explore the world together.

Our collective forgetting of children’s songs does a disservice on both levels. Earlier this year, I did fieldwork in a village in southern China, just a few hours from where I grew up. I observed two contrasts with what I had seen a decade ago, when I first went. First, there were far fewer kids in the village. Ten years ago, the village had been a ‘hollow sandwich’: the grandparents took care of the grandkids while the middle-aged worked away in factories and lived in dormitories. A family that I know well has two granddaughters. The elder, ten years old, has lived all her life with her grandparents. Her little sister, eight years younger, was born in a more comfortable time and started in the town with the parents, at the cost of not speaking any Cantonese and probably not knowing her grandparents and their village beyond holiday visits.

Second, there was much more effort put into historical preservation, though this was entirely focused on the patrilineal past: the ancestral temple and the genealogy. That excludes modes of transmission that are too private, too oral or too female to merit documentation—like children’s songs. Listening back to audio recordings from the village, the shortest interviews—the least useful ones, if one used a certain sorting mechanism—are with older illiterate women. They often responded to each question by blushing and declaring that they had ‘no culture’. The short recordings also had the most silences, which other interviewees easily filled with long trains of words.

Lullabies live in these silences. My question in fieldwork is how to observe this history that runs beyond words: maybe next time I should ask them to sing the songs, those sung to them and those they’ve sung. My question as a parent is how to raise children that are attentive to such silences.

I don’t mean to posit some mythical, oral substrate to reality—a comforting but lazy illusion. People still know this lullaby because mothers and grandmothers sang it… and because folklorists went out to collect songs, because cassette tapes and TV came along, and because diasporic parents are reviving learning materials on the internet. In other words: fragile traditions survive when a great mix of people decide to care. I started singing it to my kids not because it was transmitted by some primordial route, because I listened to it on a recording of a 1991 concert by the Hong Kong rock band Beyond.

Final thoughts. A note to self—one could do worse than to write about concerts attended with the kids, as they grow up. And: a lot of great music doesn’t give a damn about symmetry.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Last time, in the middle of reading neuroscience articles about infant consciousness, lines from William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ started playing in my head:

We’re just over a week away from baby’s due date. People ask a question that I never know how to answer: are you ever ready?

Supplies have been unearthed from the shed. There’s enough food in the pantry to feed a small village. We’ve sent off what we need to for work; what we haven’t, can wait. Even the garden is cooperating. The lilac is blooming in one corner, the wisteria in another. And yet when I typed out the question, I noticed the addition of another word: are you ever ready?

Waiting for baby, I’m properly reading poems for the first time in years. This may seem like a bookish calm before the storm, a reprieve before we have two demanding bosses in the house. In fact, my two-year-old has been asking me to read poems out loud to her. Maybe she likes the rhythm. (Why should language not dance? She’s always moving in the happiest moments on the journey to speech.)

The usual sequence goes like this. After asking me to read from my book, Ren becomes a poet and inserts her own line breaks all the time. Still, there’s some analogy between the attention required by a child and a poem: the element of surprise. Maybe the poet knows what the next line will be; maybe the child knows what they will do in the next moment. I don’t. I can always stow away the poem, less so the child.

I’m not sure which is the more heightened state: waiting for a new life or receiving it afterwards. Either seems as good a time as any for the compressed language of poetry. Compression makes one word point towards many meanings. And so it is in this passage of time, when the things we usually separate feel so close together: life and death, joy and fear. Each experience exceeds itself—surprises itself. Not long ago, I spoke about how language surprises in an interview with the poet Sarah Howe. The poem ‘Waking’, from her latest collection Foretokens, speaks to this moment of waiting:

A silent room is what every parent dreads. Dread itself is a feeling located in the abdomen, which is also where the child is. Every parent is ‘straining to hear’ what’s on the other side, but we cannot be certain of the outcome. The compression of the deep sea.

The poem doesn’t collapse the scenarios that can play out. It says: ‘unthink it’. The poet doesn’t suppress the fear or deny it, but commands herself with an act of will. Fear is transformed, not overcome. ‘Gut a sinking stone’—birth sends the child into the world, but the parent will forever be unthinking themselves.

The ‘stars’ at the end of the poem are ‘liquid’, not solid. The liquid is the hospital ceiling lights coalescing in the baby’s vision; it’s the amniotic fluid; whatever it is, some of it also persists into the future. Even when the parents are less sleep deprived, some solid parts of them have dissolved.

A large chunk of my thoughts—and ways of thinking—no longer made sense to me after Ren’s birth. (From speaking with Sarah, I learned this was the case for her too.) For more than one reason, neither thinking in the same way nor ceasing to think seem practical. If thinking requires turning things over in one’s mind, and if turning things over requires language—then changing how we think means observing whether old combinations of words break down in new circumstances or generate unexpected meaning.

Here is something I have not resolved. What I do as a parent is extremely prosaic. So how is it that I am surprised every day?

Writing about the minds of young children last time, I struggled to locate a genre of ‘solid’ nonfiction out there. Or rather: there’s plenty about them, and very little of what it is like to be them. One perk of being a poet is that you can hold the literal content of memory at arm’s length, as in Czesław Miłosz ‘Lessons’:

It’s probably fair enough that Ren interrupts when I read to her—with her gestural or verbal ‘line breaks’. Kids’ timing rarely coincides with their parents’, and that begins with their arrival. Otherwise, there would be no ‘pears dotted with white mildew’ while the clinical procedure on the umbilical cord carries on.

Life begins with an unchosen gift, attested to by the terrifying counterfactual: ‘they could have strangled / my first scream.’ The ‘giant hand’ could have done anything. The ‘defenseless’ child comes into a world already lived in. ‘Since that moment […] I have been in the hands of humans.’

Sooner or later, asymmetry surprises all of us. There’s nothing reasonable or predictable about being gifted life.

Perhaps only in a poem can we ask whether a child is ever ready to be born. The medical answer exists, of course: the child is premature or has reached full term. And there’s the developmental answer: that the child hovers somewhere on a membrane between the womb and the world in the first three months, ‘the fourth trimester’. Miłosz’ answer is more existential. The child, a creature with their own will, never willed to be born. That's the beginning to every parent-child dynamic.

There are many ways to name this dynamic. A friend recently reminded me that this baby will be born in the year of the fire horse, a Chinese zodiac combination that happens once every 60 years. We will have the marvellous job of ‘breaking’ a fiery horse to saddle, he wrote. Will Ren, herself a dragon girl, be a horse-tamer or an accomplice in crime?

A fire horse might not be a tiger, but it sounds like a fierce, flame-striped animal. What Miłosz wrote about poetry, I read and think of children:

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Recently I have found myself in little loops of relief and guilt. Relief that Ren is now so much easier to understand and interact with; guilt in the same moment that I am implicitly measuring her against an adult template, waiting for her to grow up. On top of working out how the world feels to a two year old, we’re expecting a newborn in a few weeks. So there’s no margin to hold the child’s mind at arm’s length.

What is it like to be a very young child? For a long time, the assumption within scientific circles was: there’s not much in that question, because there’s not much going on with them. They live in perpetual bewilderment, or they are precausal and precognitive, or they’re just plain eccentric. William James, a founder of modern psychology, famously wrote of the newborn’s overwhelming sensory experience as a ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’. The phrase is often quoted as an example of the view that infants are more or less unconscious before they gradually acquire awareness.

Except that’s not quite what James wrote. He wasn’t saying that babies can’t get anything right about the world or that they only become conscious later—he was referring more to the undifferentiated quality to their mind, partly because they are perceiving so much. ‘All things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must.’

In her 2009 book The Philosophical Baby, Alison Gopnik proposes that infant consciousness may be more like a ‘lantern’—diffuse and panoramic—than the ‘spotlight’ that adult minds shine onto the world. In this view, babies aren’t less conscious than we are. Their minds are more radically different from ours than implied by ‘different stages of development’. She isn’t just accepting or rejecting received wisdom. She’s also reinterpreting existing hypotheses and observations, like when she draws on James: ‘we may suppose the margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas’. James was describing scatterbrained adults; she intentionally applies this to babies.

Gopnik is also drawing on what we’ve learned about baby brains since James wrote in 1890. We know that they have immature prefrontal cortex connections, therefore weaker executive control that narrows attention; that their brains are flooded with cholinergic transmitters, which makes their world louder and brighter; and much more dense with synapses than ours, making them more open and less efficient.

En route to my fifth cup of coffee the other day, I bumped into my colleague Matan Mazor, a neuroscientist. I was curious and caffeinated—he patiently explained some recent work in the field and expressed what he found exciting about it: using new evidence to change how we conduct centuries-old debates. The frontier of experimental research continually unsettles our picture of what it is to be fully human: is the infant’s mind best understood as a ‘primitive’ version of ours, or as a qualitatively different kind of consciousness, or as something richer? The best evidence remains inconclusive, but nobody doubts anymore that this is something we can and should ask about.

The implications also keep evolving. Until the 1980s, surgery on newborns often took place with minimal or no anaesthesia—pain management was only necessary if pain was ‘meaningful’ or ‘conscious’. Each theory of the infant mind also implies a different optimal ratio of unstructured exploration and targeted stimulation in early caregiving and education.

From the baby’s point of view, neurotypicality is the stranger phenomenon. Small kids don’t fit perfectly with the neurodiversity framework, which was developed by adults with more stable identities and who can articulate the way they wish to be understood. But the framework helpfully connects our picture of how things are (natural variation in consciousness) with how we should relate to each other, i.e. don’t pathologise difference. Institutions apply the precautionary principle to infant experience—many childcare providers are now trained on neurodiversity in early childhood, for example—and parents should too. The underexplored connection here isn’t just how to parent with neurodiversity in mind. It’s also about how the study of infant consciousness changes the path along which we assume human minds proceed.

Parents’ theory of the child’s mind shapes not only their communication and behaviour—possibly, also the child’s consciousness itself. Drawing on evidence on brain synchrony between parent and child, developmental psychologists including Vasudevi Reddy and Philippe Rochat have argued that infant consciousness is relational from the first moment. Our picture of the child’s mind, in other words, isn’t just a matter of perceiving it but also partially constitutes it. If these approaches hold some truth, whether and how we ‘see’ them is anything but a detached scientific theory.

Not causing pain is important, but so is the question: what experiential world do we most want to create for the kind of being that we call a small child? Gopnik again, briefly: ‘Just as attention in children is more like a lantern, their inner consciousness may be more like wandering than voyaging—a journey of exploration rather than conquest. They paddle in the pond of consciousness instead of coursing down that rushing stream. Safe in the protected compass of immaturity, they can go anywhere they want.’

The old, paternalistic notion of ‘protection’ meant something like preventing the child from external harm. Protecting the child’s mind gives the word a fresh layer of meaning. One thing in common between a good scientist and a good parent is protecting the child against the assumption that they ought to be understood in our image. That restraint makes intimacy possible.

One of Ren’s favourite spots is the Natural History Museum in Oxford. She loves pointing and shouting at the taxidermy—I sometimes shout (softly), sometimes take videos. We often walk past a panel about the naturalist Rachel Carson, who wrote about exploring the natural world with her grandnephew: ‘If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.’

Perhaps the Buddhist metaphor of the child mind—a state prior to presuppositions—isn’t a metaphor after all. I can’t remember being an infant. But even as a child, I always preferred adults who expressed some awareness that one both gains and loses in making, and making up, one’s mind.

Carson’s ‘companionship’ goes a step further, I think: it is mutual. At the opposite end of life from infancy, the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about old age as ‘not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective’. He had ‘a long experience of life’, and added: ‘not only one's own life, but others', too.’ Though returning to the ‘lantern’ may be impossible, connecting the pond of childhood with the stream of aduldhood also protects something in ourselves—for one, the intuition to explore rather than to exploit a situation. Scientists have their equipment and theories. Anyone can look out into the world with a child.

We are preparing for the birth of a child. I’ve long wondered, without coming to any definite answer, when and how consciousness begins. Considering birth as a pharmacological event, rather than just a changing of environment, might be one way to ask the question anew. The baby is released from a neuroinhibitory context. Breathing excites the arousal centre in the brain known as the locus coeruleus, which then triggers a whole-brain awakening event—the event underlying the moment when their wide-open eyes first meet ours. Perhaps one day we will be able to scan brain activity during the birth window when both parent and child are standing, to borrow a phrase from the book reviewed last time, at a ‘doorway to all worlds’.

‘You have feet in two worlds’, I remember thinking during Ren’s first days. The expression of her consciousness shifted by the hour as she became embedded in this world. Embedding a child is a lot of what we can and should do. But who’s to say that your destination should be the world you arrive in, rather than a world you will make?

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, 2015.

A moment that stayed with us—we encounter the view that more representations of maternal finitude could stop or change a cycle of unfair expectations of mothers. Nelson doesn’t disagree, but neither does she jump into that frame: ‘I don’t want to represent anything […] I am interested in offering up my experience and performing my particular manner of thinking, for whatever they are worth.’

Elsewhere in the book, Nelson writes about matrilineal anxiety—about skinniness, about being beautiful and about fear in general. Her mother sends late-night emails that she’s having trouble sleeping for fear of bad things happening to Nelson’s child, and acts with the general ‘desire to install in me an outer parameter of horror of what could happen to a baby human on this planet’. The passage touches on one of the most persistent forms of misogyny, the pressure to make babies then the need to make the labour of having babies invisible immediately. But proclamations aren’t really what the book has to offer. Where the temptation would’ve been to extrapolate—well within Nelson’s abilities—she allows her voice to be and to remain personal.

These two moments speak to the core paradox that makes this book special, which is that it has a lot to offer on motherhood by refusing to be about it. Like a wisp, the concept enters and exits a larger life and a wider set of concerns. Nelson leaps wildly between her preoccupations. It’s hard to feel like she’s limited to anything—she appears to swim across rich oceans.

It’s also hard to know what genre she’s writing in. This isn’t an essay with one arc or one argument. We get quick sketches of an idea or an image or an impression, then she leaves it. She doesn’t seem interested in completing discussions, and even less in delivering information. There is intimacy and vividness in this style, which gives the sense that there isn’t much second guessing that the author is exerting over her own revelations. We find out that she’s become a mum in an afterthought of an anecdote about a photo mug gifted by her own mother: ‘In the photo I’m seven months pregnant with what will become Iggy, wearing a high ponytail and leopard print dress.’

Both a cause and an effect of this style is that Nelson puts her remarkably unprescriptive mind to work. She almost never frames anything as objectionable. What this loses in polemical strike-rate, it gains many times over in testing the foundations and limits of our assumptions. Many a book on motherhood, however well-intentioned, constructs a narrative cage around itself and draws in the reader. If this book does a version of this, it’s subtle enough to escape our detection.

The queer commitment to anti-essentialism carries through every impression of motherhood, which she sees as neither abject nor fixed. Being a parent, like being alive, isn’t a determinate state. We talked about this while walking to dinner a few days ago. In Jo’s words: ‘I don’t feel trapped at all by her conception of motherhood.’ Lucas put it this way: ‘There’s an emancipatory project here, but it searches rather than pushes for a reality.’

When authors reference other people’s work, it often feels deadening. This book works in the opposite direction. It joins a chorus of people reflecting on a set of themes. Not in unison, but in a more pluralistic call-and-response. There is an integrity with which Nelson thinks, sits and lives with other people. That’s exactly what you’d want your ideas to give others: toe-holds as we all climb the rock face of life. The way Nelson thinks collaboratively is a rebuttal to the masculinised authorial voice—solitary, solipsistic, slicing through the world to reach you. She embraces mutuality, which is built into motherhood on so many layers, instead of seeing it as a threat to her creativity.

When we were expecting our first child, we read several books about motherhood. In almost all of them, the partner is almost completely absent. Nelson is clear-eyed about why mothers feel separated from their previous lives and from the world. But even in the moments when other voices drop away, one remains. Nelson’s ultimate collaborator in making life itself. The book’s dedication—‘For Harry’—could not be any less tokenistic. Her love and her cares are located with him. He is present for her at every moment, even when that presence is not expressed. Both of us felt relieved to read an account where the partner is not a ghost.

Most of the time, it’s less clear what she finds interesting about her own child. Iggy features only occasionally. The book is exhilarating if you want to see a brilliant person at work—does the drudgery and tedium of child-rearing, familiar to so many mothers, truly belong here? At different points, we’ve both asked ourselves how much it is possible to resist the shrinking of our world after having a child. Nelson mentions, and only briefly comments on, a 2012 Mother’s Day cover article: ‘No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood [….] To be fair, writing well about children is tough. You know why? They’re not that interesting.’ Because of the way she moves from one topic to the next, we don’t see her grapple with this to a conclusion. For all her open-mindedness, Nelson jumps across different planets that host adult concerns. Maybe the planet of children is a different kind of different.

Or maybe the conclusion is not something she needs to say, but comes with the book’s momentum. The last part braids together Iggy’s birth and Harry’s account of his mother’s death. Nelson addresses Harry directly, and brings his voice into this ending—the collaboration, already integral, is made explicit. Fusing these life cycles in the reader’s horizon is much more than a narrative trick. It expands the old Socratic advice to prepare for death; we also need to prepare for life.

‘Here he comes onto me, rising. He is perfect, he is right. I notice he has my mouth, incredible. He is my gentle friend. He is on me, screaming.’ The plainspoken language somehow heightens the happiness that washes over Nelson in the final pages. Her child has made her happy, but not because he ‘completes’ her. Instead, his arrival follows from what she has been exploring this whole time: ‘enjoyment that doesn’t derive from filling a void, or love that is not merely balm for a wound’. Parenthood is, inherently, neither noble nor base. Among the most basic and maybe most difficult tasks of the parent is to be plain about why and how they are pursuing a relationship with their child. For, as Nelson continues: ‘most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Some would call that an ethics.’

This author isn’t someone who lets things be uncomplicated. She’s engaging with generations of pent-up frustration and the ambivalences of mothering. Every sentence is shot through with her exploration of queerness, including its apparent contradiction with procreation. But at the end, the interrogation of everything transforms into a love letter. Loving wholeheartedly need not be at the expense of the self. ‘Really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.’

Even when she brings up Iggy at the end, what she focuses on is what he does for her stepson. She thinks less about the unit and more about the relationships. Happiness is not real until it is shared. Recently we’ve been asking ourselves whether we will be able to give our second child sufficient time and attention—singular focus isn’t realistic after the first kid. But even with our first, beyond a threshold of care, her flourishing comes not from absorbing attention but from activating connections. In that sense, our next kid is coming into a world with a richer set of relationships, including the one he’ll have with his sister.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

The village under the turf

Bad weather can reveal many things. In 1850, a winter storm hit Scotland. Hundreds died. On the island of Orkney, across a narrow strait from the mainland, winds ripped up the turf along the shore. Locals discovered the outlines of small houses without roofs. It was only in 1927 that a team led by Edinburgh archeologist Vere Gordon Childe fully excavated the site.

Skara Brae is not the oldest village with permanent housing. But it is among the best preserved in Europe. It was occupied from around 3200BC. In part, the ten houses were preserved because they were built in stone, the forests having been felled several centuries before.

We visited some years ago in midsummer, which didn’t stop the hail coming at us horizontally. One of the locals laughed when we tried to open an umbrella. Such is the weather that people built Skara Brae to withstand.

Indefinite timelines, definite commitments

The other day, I was talking to a friend about where he lives and how he feels about it. He said the location feels 'indefinite’, or at least that’s what he says when people ask. The job’s good and it’s a fine enough place for the kids to grow up. Then he paused, and added that he’s become aware that the word has at least two meanings. ‘Indefinite’ can mean forever, or it can mean until things change. He switched internally between these two meanings, depending on his perspective on the day about the ambiguities of making a place home.

Skara Brae is iconic because it appears to preserve a huge leap that our ancestors made in settling down. The houses show the signs of permanence, whatever that means. The few pieces of evidence available suggest that the inhabitants were sedentary. They probably lived year-round in the village and didn’t move too far. There is, of course, a gap between these things that we shouldn’t forget. Permanent settlements and sedentary life can never be perfectly synonymous, because people can flow in and out of buildings that stay.

Childe, the archeologist in charge, didn’t bother too much with this nuance. He had a big theory about the ‘Neolithic revolution’ to tell the world. Skara Brae’s permanent houses, the tools, the evidence of barley and wheat, all pointed to surplus, specialisation and progress. Later scholars inverted this: maybe agriculture was the trap, hunter-gatherers the originally affluent. The issue is both positions assume that permanence was a fixed event, rather than an experiment under continual revision.

One word that is absent from these debates is what my friend said: ‘indefinite’. I think about it when Skara Brae comes to mind, because I wonder about the timelines that these people lived with. How did the state of mental uncertainty change when people stopped moving primarily with the seasons or with animals, but stuck it out and worked things out in one location? What kind of experiment was committing to a place over the course of generations?

The invention of the house

We now have many ways to understand the ‘Neolithic revolution’. What’s clear is that major facts about human societies—think urbanisation, agriculture, hierarchy, centralisation, and the like—are not as tightly connected in a sequence as they once appeared to be. Insofar as there’s something we discovered by ‘settling down’, it wasn’t unending progress. But certain kinds of domesticity were new. Places like Skara Brae reveal our ancestors’ social experiments within the house.

Consider the hearth. Fires had been integral to human survival for hundreds of thousands of years. The revolution of the hearth was to control fire in one place. The houses of Skara Brae centre around stone-lined hearths with build-in tanks. The hearth marked the house as long-term investment, however uncertain the timeline. It changed how people cooked and ate. Life could go on beyond sunset.

When did parents start making their kids sit down together for meals? The hearths of Skara Brae might give a clue. The deeper and darker point is how the hearth restricted the movement of individuals. Probably women, whose work may have become increasingly domestic. And probably children, who may have had less freedom to wander around in little bands.

Or take the furniture in the houses—beds, dressers, shelves, even built-in cupboards. One school of thought would say this: once people have furniture, they have positions to assign, and inequality ensues. I’m not sure about that. People can have different positions without being unequal, and positions can change. Many of the houses, for example, have two stone beds, one larger and one smaller. Were the different-sized beds assigned by gender or by parents versus children? We don’t know. But there’s no reason to think that domesticity necessarily implies a particular set of social arrangements. People were probably figuring things out as they go along, much as we do today.

Why privacy? What’s property?

Not long ago, on a ferry to a Scottish island, I met another dad in the on-board playroom. He said people on the island live in more nucleated—clustered—households than on the mainland. I’d never heard the word ‘nucleated’ outside archeology. And yet that’s exactly what Skara Brae is, to an extreme: ten houses built into the same mound, forming one unit, connected by covered passages. One reason why Skara Brae stuck in my memory is because the houses felt so modern. But that feeling is deceptive, because no matter what word we use, the village was profoundly different from anything we would recognise today.

The people of Skara Brae didn’t live near each other, they lived in one maze together. The uniform size and shape of the houses suggest a degree of egalitarianism. The passageways show the intensity of social surveillance. Retreat from the harsh weather was a function of the house. Retreat from other people, no.

Around 2500BC, after six centuries of inhabitation, Skara Brae was abandoned. This reminds us that, at the most basic level, people were not stuck. Leaving was on the table, as far as ‘indefinite’ was concerned. Perhaps the lack of privacy got to them—enough was enough. If I could interview the villagers about anything, I’d ask them about how they thought about privacy while they lived at Skara Brae. Then I’d want to hear whether they got what they wanted when they left.

In any case, people moved out from the nucleated village to farmsteads spread around the island. Separate houses meant bounded domestic spaces, less communal interference with childrearing and family arrangements, and greater ease in storing surplus without the pressure to redistribute.

Insofar as bounded homes reflected the separation of interests, privacy was necessarily political. Imagine how different the concept of property at Skara Brae would have been from what we know. How does ownership work when everyone is connected and clustered, and what would inheritance even look like? Dispersed farmsteads followed a much more familiar formula: house and land meant heritable property.

Property isn’t just about space, it’s also about how people relate to each other. In a place like Skara Brae, the dynamic between parent and child may have been one among many significant ties. The intensification of the parent-child bond after the abandonment would have been convenient for property accumulation. The question, then and now, is whether a focus on accumulation makes it easier or harder for people to feel at home—in their life, with their family, in their house.

Through this lens, permanence seems less like an end state, and more like the beginning of many arguments. How does reduced mobility change the experience of living even with the same people? Who inherits what? When is it time for the next experiment?

From house to home

A few years after visiting Skara Brae, we took Ren to the National Museum in Edinburgh. Our purpose was singular: to see carved stone balls from the Neolithic. Hundreds of these have been found around Scotland, several from Skara Brae. The fist-sized spheres are elegantly carved, precisely made, highly symmetrical.

The marvellous carved balls suggest something about permanence that I find reassuring. The balls can travel, but the craft would have involved very long stretches at home, or at least in one place. Roving physically and in the imagination are only loosely connected.

Nobody seems to know why these balls were made. Theories abound. If they were ritual or artistic heirlooms, that might point to a portable sense of home. Permanence may have created the conditions to find a place in a world that changes—both against our will and because we want it to.

For as long as I can remember, something in the phrase ‘settling down’ has irritated me, something about (the appearance of) stability as a desirable endpoint. Building houses and homes require definite commitments, but they also open us up to indefinite timelines. Therein lies dynamism and uncertainty. It seems to me that if we can see our remote Neolithic ancestors as people trying things out, we can also see our own lives in a different light. Not much is inevitable in parenthood, or in anything else.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

One of my life’s great pleasures is spending time around Jo’s wonderful way with words. How she clarifies and dilates reality through language enters the stream of my experience. So I’m glad to bring parts of this conversation to your inbox.

What’s most strikingly different about our relationship these days?

Jo, no-italics: The most obvious thing is just that we have a lot less time for each other. What I feel most nostalgic about is the psychic space to devote our full undivided attention to the other person. Little kids are like vortexes of attention, you know? The surface area of our relationship is less as individuals who are coming together, more as parents who are engaged in this mutual project.

Lucas, italics: That’s why it’s so nice to be here, because the big thing is just time. I don’t think I really understood the need for one-on-one time before having kids. I didn’t know what you meant by that. Now, I want some time together, but I also want time alone with you and time alone with her. Which requires planning. At the same time that we’re growing our relationship, there’s this need to really carve out and defend that space and time. I didn’t quite anticipate that.

Something I worry about with having two kids is that a lot of people go for the divide-and-conquer mentality. Which makes sense, but then you’re never with your partner. To me, being a parent with another adult is indescribably more pleasurable than just being with a kid. When Ren went from a baby to a toddler, she needed interaction all the time. I can experience long stretches of boredom when I’m just with an adult or when I’m just with a kid. Switching between both energies is an ideal balance.

The important change is less about our activities. It’s more our relationship to time. Before having a kid, the moment was all that needed to exist. That’s what it felt like to be fully present. Every moment in the life of a parent is in a sequence of things. When did your kid last eat or sleep? I’m very absorbed in each moment of interacting with her. But you can’t afford to be lost in the moment because there are all these things you need to bear in mind. Our relationship is also on that register a lot of the time. I think about that for our second kid, because there were moments in the first year when the needs were so pressing that we were far apart psychologically.

Having a kid is such a future-oriented decision. Not just a time horizon in the big picture sense, it puts a forward tilt into each day. I want there to be little lagoons of just being present with each other. But I’m happy with the directionality in our relationship.

How do you think back on the uneven burden of becoming parents?

A cool part of having kids with someone is developing rapport, or telepathy, about how to achieve common goals and what the other person needs. You’re teammates in a different way than when you’re dealing with adults exclusively. I long for more time with you, but I don’t feel I’ve become a stranger to you or to myself.

Our efforts are usually synchronised, not working at cross purposes. The structural inequality in the first year of life was definitely greater than I’d thought. All things considered, I didn’t have much resentment about it at the time. It wasn’t your fault per se, I just felt quite lonely in it. I had maternity leave, so we weren’t outsourcing any childcare. We were having very parallel experiences. Especially when I had insomnia. I had some anxieties about whether this was setting a precedent that wouldn’t be resolved naturally. But you worked at this, and what we’re able to give her has converged.

I remember talking to people who mentioned the inequality in the first half year. Even having registered that cognitively, I was still surprised by the extent of specific needs and dependencies like breastfeeding. The inequality was stark and then stuck around for probably a year. It didn’t push us apart fundamentally, but there were many situations that were not ideal. Part of it was trying to stay honest with yourself and with each other in those moments. Part of it was trying to have some perspective. When it’s your first child, you have no idea whether a phase will last for two days or two months or two years.

Something that makes me sad is how the gendered burden of parenting affects memory. My storage of memory was completely broken for a time. To an extreme extent, because of my insomnia. But I think it’s very common for new mums. This can make it easy for people to elide over how hard things are for the birthing parent. I realise that I’m doing that now. My personality is such that it’s very easy for me to remember the positive stuff. It’s harder to remember specific negatives. This can perpetuate a degree of misogyny around motherhood.

I would’ve felt a lot of resentment if you deliberately benefited from patriarchal norms to freeload off my labour. That would be corrosive to my love for you. But that wasn’t my experience. I didn’t feel like you were abandoning me. I suppose the social aspect of it is giving more equitable parental leave. I’m really happy you have longer leave this time. It’ll be lovely.

What gives direction to our experience of parenthood?

I can see how parents can easily sail off in different directions from each other. There’s growing our child, growing our family, growing our relationship… I don’t take for granted that they should overlap. I’m glad that they mostly do. It’s helped us to have been on the same page about the intent of becoming parents. That made it more likely that we’d have a shared experience.

It's really nice to have an interest in common with your partner. We're both obsessed with this thing that we have a huge stake in. We can talk about it for ages together. There’s something really vital about parenting, I love the dynamism of it. We’re constantly changing as our child changes.

We’re growing, but it’s oriented towards the kids. They are the protagonists. Our growth isn’t as valuable for its own sake. Our new momentum comes from observing her—what connections she seeks, what she responds positively to in the world. One of our kid’s favourite words is ‘hop’, because she loves bunnies. That’s what it feels like, the horizon has hopped a generation.

Thinking back on our first kid, I never assumed I would feel completely ready. My experience is that once you have your kid, it really feels like they’re your destiny. They’re not hypothetical anymore. They're this really specific person that you know and love.

Some people prefer longer age gaps between kids, but I think you might as well lean into this season of life. You’ve already been banished from the mainland of human experience onto the island of kid logic—you've already ruined your life in the best possible way. This is something I didn't really understand before the first kid. I thought I could go back. But you can't go back. There's no re-entry. There's only this new life.

What has changed in our own sense of time?

Something I’ve never yet said out loud is that I don’t feel abstracted from the preciousness of mortality anymore. Each time I’m with her is one of the few moments when she will be this version of herself. I can love it as intensely as I want but it will still be gone. Love cannot hold it in place. Whereas adults have a steadiness to them. Time has transformed her to someone unrecognisable from when she was born. This process of continuously grieving all the versions of her that came before. You’re thinking about the future to help them build towards it, being in the present to savour every second, and thinking about who they were. Because they forget it. They can’t archive themselves. It makes me relate to the time differently. I was thinking about what feels different about my birthday since having a kid. Because I actually feel really positive about my birthday now. I don't feel any anxiety about ageing, it's like I've reset the clock almost. Time now is filtered through her. It feels like a series of opportunities rather than this slow erosion.

Are we more a couple or less a couple than before?

I would say we're probably not a couple. I think we're much more like partners, much more intertwined. It also feels sad if I frame us as a couple because it excludes Ren. I miss getting to just swim in the waters of each other, but there’s no way in which I’d want it to go back to just being the two of us, because then she wouldn’t exist. I think our family is our priority. And you are the most fundamental element of the family. So in that sense, if I had to be really ruthless, I would say that you are my priority. But that doesn't feel like the right language, almost. To me, you are the largest elemental force that creates the tides and creates the entire systems logic of the family. So in that sense, priority is not the right word, but it's like ... the keystone.

This frame of the family is still compatible with us prioritising each other—it’s the thing you said about the keystone. We’re two of something larger. The other person is the key to this larger thing. But sometimes that means our attention for each other cannot be unequivocal. It’s been more challenging to move past that kind of focus than I’d thought. As if I’ve been on a saxophone solo and am now learning to play chords.

Lucas’ postscript. Throughout the conversation, we’d pause and notice all the large and small things that allowed us to have the conversation. Not just my parents stepping in. My brother put Ren to bed one night so we could go out for dinner and talk more. It takes a village to raise a parent, no less than a child. Or, the fact that we can expect more time together for this next parental leave, when I’ll have three months instead of two weeks. This whole newsletter is about finding pockets of time, making something of them, asking what gives them their shape. Thanks for dipping into this pocket.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

The townhouse, or haveli, was tucked into an alley just across old Delhi’s imposing mosque, Jama Masjid. In the alley were multiple temples. Within the first 24 hours, I passed by head-shaving ceremonies for babies, engagement rituals and a funeral. As if life’s seasons were compressed in a time lapse. I’m sure I could have snuck into a wedding, if I’d stayed longer. The street packed with carnivorous Mughlai fare ran parallel to the one filled with pure veg restaurants.

I mentioned all this to a colleague who smiled and said: welcome to syncretistic India.

The idea of syncretism has its merits. But it also reminds me of slick travel brochure vocabulary that glosses over the reality of reconciling differences. I thought of a traveller from the eleventh century. The polymath al-Biruni, born in what is today Uzbekistan, accompanied the Ghaznavid empire’s military campaigns into India. His interests were more in Sanskrit and in speaking with yogis. He was probably the first outsider to attempt a comprehensive description of what we now call Hinduism.

Al-Biruni was not a syncretist. Instead, he was remarkable for recognising differences with an open mind: ‘many a subject appearing intricate and obscure which would be perfectly clear if there were more connection between us.’ One modern scholar said that al-Biruni was the first to write an objective history of religion. I take ‘objective’ with a grain of salt. For example, he couldn’t resist assimilating the educated Hindu as a monotheist in disguise.

That said, al-Biruni asked questions about pluralism and truth that still resonate today. He also hinted that each tradition may in fact be multiple. Distinct identities can be part of each other.

From Delhi I went southward to Hyderabad. The city had been ruled as a princely state during the colonial period. Centuries of Hindu-Muslim interaction resulted in a robust if finely balanced tehzeeb, or shared culture. Hyderabad was far away from the northern states, where hardened forms of modern Hindu and Muslim identity first developed. In 1948, military action took place when the Nizam, its ruler, refused to join the Indian republic.

Maybe we learn more about the nature of communal division from a child’s perspective than from that of yogis or politicians. In the words of Abdul Quddus Saheb, then a teenage musician:

The violence followed by those five days of invasion shattered our lives—took away the tehzeeb of our everyday lives.

Abdul also said:

In those days I would sing the songs of Muharram both in Urdu and Telugu. I was not even twenty and so enthusiastic about this performance as I strongly believed in its ability to connect Hindus and Muslims. There was no separation between Hindus and Muslims either in daily life, or during these religious events.

Another witness of the military action, Razia Begum, shared her adolescent memories only after repeated visits by a historian. ‘I didn’t think at any point of my lifetime I would be able to return to those sad memories of separation and hatred.’ She continued:

We suddenly began to realize that we were actually in the middle of new language—the language of hatred. Until then we were happy and our lives were peaceful, or at least, confined to our quiet homes.

Why should these categories be obvious? The notion that adults are capable of political decision-making, in contrast to children, can seem tenuous.

Sadly, the damage to the Hyderabadi tehzeeb after 1948 is far from the last time that trust has turned into distrust. Or to borrow a line from a short story by N.K. Swamy, how ‘a long-time friend now becomes a suspicious entity and a stranger too’. In old Delhi, locals told me that this mixed neighbourhood was less polarised than others. Everyone lives on top of each other, and livelihoods are intertwined. But any optimism about the social fabric was tinged with precariousness.

From the first calls for self-rule (swaraj) to the present day, Indian democracy has involved the search for a political self. Who belongs to the nation? A political scientist in Hyderabad talked about increasing numbers of nationalistic young men in his classroom. Managing volleys of jingoistic slogans is now part of his job. All this in a city that has been a leader in gender parity.

Some years ago over Zoom, I interviewed a high school student for a scholarship. She spoke about growing up in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat violence. The communal conflict killed over a thousand people and redrew neighbourhoods. Her relationship to schoolmates became thin as glass, as did her image of her own place in society. I thought of that conversation again in light of how young people’s attitudes can quickly harden. It’s not that they didn’t have to navigate differences in pre-1948 Hyderabad or pre-2002 Gujarat. It’s that received categories can so easily smother the intricate interplay between self-perception and social identity.

I’m writing this as I wait for the red-eye flight to get back for some time with my daughter. I’m reminded that the kind of dialogue that al-Biruni practised is something we experience in everyday life: encountering differences establishes the boundaries of the self. Hardening and rupture are often part of growing up. We can’t control this process in children, but we can attend to it. In doing so, we’re also rethinking our own attitudes.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

For a moment last week, we were four generations in a room. Understandably, you had no idea why we were sitting quietly by the bed of a slumbering old lady. So my mother, your grandmother, whisked you away for a playdate with a canine friend. My grandmother, meanwhile, woke up eventually. We made eye contact. Then I began speaking. She yawns but cannot respond with words. That has been the state of play for a few years.

While she was sleeping, I wondered about your taipo, great-grandmother: who are you to each other, and what would you talk about? The second question is hypothetical. She can no longer have conversations, even if you were to wake up tomorrow with fluent Cantonese. But talking may not be the right activity to focus on. It seems we often share vocabulary but not meaning with our parents; interaction rather than vocabulary with our grandparents; and rarely more than sheer co-presence with our great-grandparents.

In 2023, taipo was rushed to the hospital after she collapsed and her heart stopped beating. By the time I arrived, there was a proper crowd waiting in the lobby to wait for news about her. My mother and her siblings had to plead with people to go home. There’s no guarantee, of course, that people will reciprocate if you treat them well. But acts of kindness have a way of spilling beyond the confines of a single interaction. And for most of history, kindness has also often made or broken people on the knife edge of survival.

Generosity is often assumed to require leisure and resources. You will learn that the generous and the wealthy coincide only sometimes. Taipo was ‘just’ a hungry girl from village China, in school for just a few years before the fields claimed all her days. In 1962, the teenage taipo left the village for Hong Kong. In the cover of darkness, she swam across the river that was also the border. Patrols caught her several times and sent her back for months of forced labour. Most illegal migrants didn’t know how to swim. They bobbed along on basketballs or anything that would float, then kicked for their lives. When she talked about this, she always mentioned companions who drowned on the water crossing and others who were taken down by sharks.

Taipo both gained and lost a family in the new place. She met your great-grandfather a couple years after arriving. They married in 1966. Their eldest, your grandmother, was born a year later. But not long after she had left the village, she heard from word-of-mouth that her mother had died. She never learned what sickness killed her mother, who was only in her forties. Regret was laced but not diminished by the knowledge of certain starvation if she hadn’t left. And she felt all her life that her little brother in the village had to grow up alone and fend for himself—without his parents or big sister around. She didn’t tell me these darker thoughts, and I’m not sure I’d know how to ask about them.

To start her own family was to give almost constantly of herself. Perhaps no moment of the day captured this as well as dinnertime. She cooked for more than a dozen people every night, not only her kids but also cousins, nieces and nephews and other relatives, who lived in the same tiny apartment or nearby. I should add that ‘relatives’ barely required blood ties. Poverty was one challenge among many for this kin. All official communication in Hong Kong was in English, for example. People had no idea when they were being made redundant or got into legal trouble. They relied on each other—and the young children learning English at school—to survive.

If generosity is too difficult to institutionalise, proximity may be a starting point. While your great-grandfather staffed a herbal medicine shop, taipo sewed gloves at home. That kept her physically close not only to her family but also to the neighbours. Each floor had six apartments surrounding an atrium. She processed heavy bags of fabric while all the kids on the floor played in the atrium. Bowling with glass bottles was a popular game. All poor and recent migrants, neighbours naturally relied on each other. Taipo kept in touch with them for many decades, and went to many weddings of kids in that building.

More than half a century later, I can still see the bonds created by common struggle. But if we are to remember, we should also not lose sight of the dark sides—of which there were many, when it came to expectations for women to give endlessly. Patrilineal assumptions made it easier for her husband’s relatives, against her own, to expect kindness from them. My mother recalled that taipo would wash all the dishes for everyone after having already made them dinner. In a slightly different universe, you might be asking her about what lay under the tip of this iceberg.

My grandparents occasionally argued because they had different notions of generosity. Your great-grandfather had an almost sacrificial approach to solidarity with other migrants. He hated refusing any request for help, whether that meant lending money or picking up new arrivals in the middle of the night. Taipo was more cautious. They were already barely managing responsibilities for an extended family, not to mention four young children. She thought they should be helpful but consider their means carefully.

Kinkeeping is not always pleasing and sometimes requires breaking conventions. My mother was a teenager when she went on her first overseas trip, with taipo to Malaysia. They went because taipo wanted to find a long-lost aunt who had moved there to work in the homes of wealthy Chinese families. Long-lost, because taipo’s hot-tempered father had severed ties with his sister for what he perceived as her abandonment of family duties. In fact, taipo’s aunt was a ‘comb sister’—early 20th century women who refused to marry, worked towards economic independence and pooled resources to support each other. Taipo remembered playing with her aunt as a child and never stopped missing her. Both were thrilled to be reunited for one day in Kuala Lumpur. They caught up on the many intervening years and talked about the aunt’s plans to retire soon and return home.

The stereotype, that Chinese families involve relationships beyond the grave, is not untrue. The retirement and return never happened. Once again, an unknown and lethal illness struck. Your great-grandmother, then your grandmother, went to Malaysia several times to find this aunt’s remains. ‘Comb sisters’ were often buried by each other because they were no longer connected to their birth family. A taxi driver finally suggested the right place where they found the urn. Locating these remains was a psychological near-necessity for taipo. Even in death, she wanted to return her aunt to the family fold.

To say the obvious: taipo’s worldview is different from mine, not to mention yours. Around 10, she stopped eating beef because she spent all day with cows working the fields. Around 30, she started eating vegetarian twice a month, inspired by a Daoist strand of popular religion. After her husband passed, it was important to her that I lit incense and bowed before the altar whenever I visited her home. In fact, many of my adult conversations with her took place when we were out for vegetarian food. It amused her that I also liked Buddhist restaurants. There’s no need to identify with a worldview to participate in it. One generational tension is that it’s hard to spend time together if you don’t understand each other. But if you don’t spend time, you will never understand.

En route to our hike up Lion Rock mountain the other day, we went past where taipo lived when I was a kid. I thought about the many things she fed me. Like my other grandparents, she taught me not to be picky with food. Amusingly, and unlike the rest of them, she couldn’t actually do as she said. She was never stoic when a taste displeased her. Sourness made her squirm. Having grown up without dairy, butter grossed her out—the image of her face reminds me of how you sometimes react when I feed you something new. She especially liked feeding us fruit. I remember walking through the wet market as she scrutinised the grapes and slapped the watermelons to test for the best. When I asked her later, she said she grew up looking forward to the fruit harvests every other year, of guava, lychee and longan. As with many of her habits, fruit-eating came from her childhood in the 1950s.

The experience of communist China in that decade suggests that it is futile to institutionalise generosity. Mutual aid turned into coercive collectivisation, then rationing and starvation. The coercive element also implies that a gift economy could not be relied upon. Without these disastrous policies, your great-grandparents may not have left their villages. They lived out the paradox that they were better able to practice generosity in a British colony that was set up for avarice.

Or maybe the picture isn’t so black-and-white. Taipo’s assessment of the communists wasn’t as bleak as her husband’s, who never forgot how every last grain of rice from the family’s harvest was ‘volunteered’ away. She had no nostalgia for life before Hong Kong but could sing me 1950s revolutionary songs without flinching. There was genuine optimism in the first years of the People’s Republic that the party was facilitating voluntary expressions of peasant solidarity. The question that people will debate for years is whether the regime could have evolved without mass violence, or whether it was doomed to brutalise the already-downtrodden to whom the revolution was meant to deliver a better life.

Compared to political sea changes, parenthood is a minute institution. And yet it is also mighty, in its gambles and in its implications. Every parent takes a chance in whether they can succeed in raising a kind person. To our surprise, you’ve been good at sharing from the beginning. Now that you’re a toddler, of course it’s your right to be unpredictably possessive. We should hold ourselves accountable to not letting the world crowd out your kinder instincts. We hope you can rely on yourself as well as those who came before you.

I would say, don’t trust me on all this family history and find out for yourself, but I already have the feeling that you aren’t one to accept much at face value. My mother, and her siblings and cousins, have told me some but not all of their memories. Taipo told me her own story, but I’d ask her different questions now in light of your birth. Her parents were not in my life. I was lucky to grow up with three living great-grandmothers—taipo’s mother was the only one who didn’t live to a ripe old age. But I didn’t talk to them all that much about those continents of experience before my time.

Were I able to, what would I ask my great-grandmothers today—apart from how they managed to survive against all odds and bring up their children and grandchildren? I would ask what it was like give so much, both the light and the shadow sides. I would ask what felt chosen and what was imposed. Then I’d ask myself whether the world today makes for more generous people, and how to hold steady for you.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Our family holiday in Taipei, in the last week of 2025, was surprisingly productive on one front. We’re expecting another child in a few months, so we’re on the lookout for names. The streets of Taipei have many more Chinese characters—many of which are transliterated—than the villages of Oxfordshire, so we had field days. We roped my parents and siblings into discussions about translations and combinations. The days between Christmas and New Year have a heightened sense of the past meeting the future, as does the act of choosing a name. This piece looks at names on several levels: that of the child we already have, traditions of name-giving, and the significance of calling new life.

Names are important clues to past societies. The Annales School, based in France, used naming patterns to study the ‘total history’ of society. These scholars changed the way we write history, making it not just about kings and queens but also about you and me and everyone we interact with. They insisted on creating huge databases with individual-level data, instead of relying on aggregate statistics. The names of individuals were the foundation to reconstitute how families and communities changed over centuries. History is happening every time a child is named, whether actively or passively.

Since my thoughts on name-giving have developed almost entirely in conversation with Jo—I’m the dead weight, let’s be honest—I’ve asked her to contribute a few thoughts.

We decided against giving her both an English and Cantonese first name like many Hong Kongers and instead use her transliterated Chinese name as her English name.

We arrived in Hong Kong for the New Year. Several confusing playground interactions have accentuated the oddity of our decision to forego the dual-name convention in Hong Kong. The irony is that our kid’s name generates more confusion in a Cantonese-speaking place. Hong Kongers got used to giving their children (or themselves) two names as a pragmatic compromise in a British colony. That’s before people look at our kid with light brown hair, who is expected to be essentially Anglophone.

As a mixed family, we immediately face tensions in name-giving, between the old and the new and between multiple traditions. We’ll see how our kids respond to our decisions. My parents had also given us only Chinese names—we chose our English names as teens. It was an ambivalent part of growing up in postcolonial Hong Kong. My brother captured it in something he wrote as a teen:

On the one hand, there was the intimacy of trust, autonomy and even a taste of freedom and power; on the other, I was conscious of a vague sense of incompleteness, stemming from the lack of a ‘proper’ name.

There’s already some distance between myself and traditional name-giving. Jo’s external perspective gave me a new context from which to think about engaging with Chinese names creatively. Here she is again:

It’s so unique how Chinese names draw from the whole wealth of the language rather than being limited to only a handful of designated given names. Of course there are still naming conventions but they allow for much more creative, diverse, and bespoke naming. I think the fact that given names are comprised of two characters enables you to be even more expressive — it can feel like an exciting puzzle thinking of which characters both sound complementary and work together conceptually, not to mention how they look when written out. I love the poetic resonance that can come from how you pair two characters. I’m not aware of any other language that has such a linguistically evocative and personal component to naming.

Plus, in Jo’s words, ‘something we discovered in the process of discussing her name was a preference for using more conceptual characters’. We ended up with the name 安仁, which we transliterated An Ren. An is ‘peace’, as in Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Ren is a key term in Confucian thought, which points at the essence of being human and the root of benevolence. Humaneness: the first of three translations of ren that I’m going to offer in this piece.

A whole lot of baggage comes with a concept like ren. There’s much to hold onto from the past and plenty to discard. Signalling class position—with literary characters, for example—is central to the history of Chinese names, but not to us. Very sophisticated names, whether silly or beautiful, feel out of place. We also disregarded the numerological relationship between the characters and the child’s destiny. We looked for a name that was both rich and simple.

Concepts don’t get much richer or simpler than love, which is a second way to translate ren. This is how the sinologist Richard Wilhelm rendered the term in his version of the Analects. Willhelm’s translation was influenced by his background as a Christian missionary, but there is also textual support. When asked by a student to define ren, Confucius said it meant ‘to love others’ (愛人). To my surprise, whoever penned the Wikipedia entry wrote one of my favourite contemporary discussions of ren: ‘human love and interaction is the source of humaneness, the source of the human self.’

Love can be fraught. That’s something we want to remind ourselves, suggest to our daughter, and imply to the world. Especially so when it comes to gender, central to our conversations. In addition to Ren taking Jo’s last name, we wanted a gender-neutral first name. Every language I know has ways to gender names. Different characters are commonly used for boys and girls, and components within a character can be feminised. An Ren steers clear of these traditions. Orthodox interpretations of Confucian thought emphasised deference based on social hierarchies: wife to husband, child to parent, servant to lord. So far, our kid shows no signs that she will defer to anyone. We wanted a fierce daughter, a (year of the) dragon girl, and so far, we’ve gotten what we asked for.

The way we chose our daughter’s name, and the significance we invested in it, reminds me of a broader trend in name-giving over centuries. Jacques Dupâquier, a French historian of the Annales School, unearthed the rigid conventions of name-giving by compiling massive databases. Naming had been formulaic. Children were often named after godparents, usually family members. Dupâquier identified a rupture from the 18th century onwards, when names became much more diverse. He attributed this, in part, to autonomous parental choice and perceptions of children as unique individuals. He called this the ‘liberation of first names’.

With the increasing availability of comparable databases for regions of China, one day we may be able to tell whether a similar ‘liberation’ took place with Chinese name-giving. For now, we can’t be sure. The paradox is that Chinese families have peculiarly detailed and extensive genealogies, but their potential has been much less realised. One reason is that clan genealogies (zupu 族譜) probably only ever accounted for a minority, unlike European parish registers that included everyone, since everyone was theoretically Christian. Another reason is that these genealogies are often in private hands rather than public archives, and also likely to have been destroyed during the 20th century. My relatives tell me that it could be for any of the above reasons that we have no access to genealogies on either side of my family.

At the same time, as a parent rather than a historian, I bristle at individualisation as a complete story. I’m here to support my kids to become full individuals, but that fullness comes through a richness of context that includes both inheritance and adventure, freedom and responsibility. In other words, it’s also part of my job to convey the limits of being an individual. Nobody gets to choose, unconstrained, who they are and where they come from. Names are a reminder of rootedness. My daughter’s composite name—with two distinct characters plus Jo’s last name in the English version and my last name in the Chinese version—sharpens an intuition: that a name has weight less as a singular point of pressure and more as a balance of forces.

Onto a third and final translation of ren. In 1948, the theatre scholar P.C. Chang found himself on the drafting committee of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He was unhappy with the Christian language with endowed rights for the purposes of a global document. So he introduced ren as an alternative, which he rendered ‘two-man-mindedness’. The clunky phrase points to a view that rights are universal not from an image of God in which we are created, but because they flow from our capacity to sympathise with others. The term put forward a vision of human rights as a project to socialise humanity.

All three translations of ren contain a seed that we want to plant for our Ren: that you’re never alone. The concept also suggests that it’s ultimately not for parents to legislate for their children, through name-giving or any other means. Any relationship needs guidelines, especially one involving children, but the core parent-child dynamic is creating life together. A name is a clue to that collaboration. It’s the beginning of a dialogue between three audiences: the child, the parent and the world.

More to think about before arriving at name #2. I’ll sign off with another thought from Jo:

I hope that my kids names express to some extent both where they come from and some part of our values. I think this is why we focused on how to approach gender, ethnicity and meaning when exploring Ren’s name and now thinking about what to call our son.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

Every few weeks we come to London, though we aren’t here as much as we were before having a kid. Christmas markets help with the challenge of entertaining a small child on dark winter days. It’s equal parts touching and amusing to see parents’ desperate attempts to keep the kids wrapped up and content. I notice many more dads around over the holiday period. That’s nice, but also says something about the rest of the year.

Parenthood comes with questions about the gender division of labour, something I’m planning to write about more in 2026. In what direction are we moving? What would it take to move past the male breadwinner model? This instalment is to get the cogs turning.

Yesterday I took Ren for the first time to Covent Garden, following the Christmas lights. Around the corner and just over a century ago, Alice Clark was thinking about these questions at the London School of Economics. Clark, as her name suggests, came from the family that made the famous shoes. The LSE had women as both staff and students from its founding in 1895. It was open to unconventional people like Clark, who’d already been active for a couple decades as a suffragist and a businesswoman. Clark was also unconventional in how she approached the male breadwinner. In search for an alternative, she asked, what if we looked not forwards but backwards?

Alice Clark published The working life of women in the seventeenth century in 1919. Her intuition was to reject women’s work as a ‘static factor in social developments’. She interpreted the 1600s as a transitional period towards this later paradigm of the male breadwinner. Prior to this transition, women were involved across industry and agriculture. The home was a central unit of shared work, which gave women a strong and relatively equal position in this pre-capitalist system.

This stood in contrast to industrial society, where men worked outside the home and women were reduced to unpaid domestic labour. Later studies stylised Clark’s hypothesis as a u-shaped curve—from a maximal rate of female economic participation around 1700, to a reduction during industrialisation, and climbing back to pre-industrial levels only in the second half of the 20th century.

To ask whether this picture holds up for 17th century London, we need to sweep away some cobwebs. The documentation shows a heavy bias towards recording women’s marital status over their occupational status. Concepts can be misleading when projected back in time—take the title ‘Mrs’, which wasn’t exclusively about marriage but referred to social position, and the possession of capital in particular. And then there’s a question of how to reconcile different sources. A sample from Christ’s Hospital tells us that between 35% and 59% of married women worked in the same business as their husbands, whereas the number was 15% in court records and 17% in criminal records.

‘Housewife’ is one of the most revelatory concepts upon scrutiny. ‘Housewifery’ was continuous with what Clark called ‘domestic industry’, which included the production of goods by the family for sale or exchange. Women owned and ran ‘beerhouses’, they were part of craft guilds, and they worked in trades from pawnbroking to medicine. Domestic servants were often involved in their employer’s livelihood—someone might go from performing ‘housewifery’ in an inn to ‘production’ by pulling pints. London also had a blurrier separation of work by gender than rural England.

In unified household economies, women played important roles even when these were unnamed, unlisted and uncompensated. Take the example of Elizabeth Jeake, married to a merchant called Samuel. The family traded in commodities like hops and flaxseed, which they transported to London markets. Elizabeth never engaged in paid labour and doted on their children—her ‘little tribe’, her ‘cubbs’ and her ‘two pair of illmatched clogs’, as she calls them. That didn’t stop her from having a central part in negotiating credit relationships, making purchase orders, giving instructions to contractors and gathering investment information. As Samuel wrote to her in 1697 after a successful flaxseed purchase: ‘you do manage it so well that I cannot do better.’ There simply wasn’t a firm division between the household and the business.

The phenomenon of ‘housewifery’ raises more basic questions about how we understand work. In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith formulated one of the most consequential ideas in economics when he distinguished between productive and non-productive labour. Productive labour went towards creating sellable commodities, whereas non-productive labour resulted in ‘services which perish generally in the very instance of their performance’. Smith’s aim was to ask why some countries prospered more than others, but his idea swept care work into the non-productive basket. Without intending to, the great 18th century economist made invisible dynamic aspects of the 17th century and paved the way for 19th century ideologies of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women. We’re still recovering from the power of his ideas.

Clark’s hypothesis prompted people to ask how professions became segregated. Medical intervention later became masculine as a rule, but in this period there were domains of female authority. Until the 1720s, midwives were licensed through the church and exchanged knowledge through this system. This came to an end when midwifery became a male trade by the mid-1700s. The business of feeding people is another arena of change. Women had been dominant in brewing beer and making cheese, but this was on its last legs by the 17th century. We still don’t know exactly why.

We do know more about how women managed assets. This offers a different angle onto the extent of relative equality from standard metrics of labour participation. Consider Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Hatchett, who lived on Bell Alley in the City in the late 1600s. A court case revealed that the Elizabeths didn’t just manage their households’ ‘stuff’. They also worked together as pawnbrokers and provided credit lines all around the city, even south of the Thames. In other words, these women weren’t separate from the commercial economy but enabled it to function. There are two points to bear in mind about the laws of ‘coverture’ that restricted women’s ownership of property. The first is that the laws very much mattered. Unlike most European countries, England didn’t require a legal guardian for single women, including widows. The second is that even those women subject to coverture laws often found ways to sidestep these obstacles.

What should we make of the fact that so many 17th century Londoners worked in family businesses? After domestic service, the most common category of work for women was making and mending clothes. London specialised in gold and silver lace, and high-quality linen. There’s something to be said for flexibility. I’m reminded of my maternal grandmother, who switched from shift-work in a garments factory to piece-work at home when she had young children. And there’s something to be said for direct learning within the family, whether from parents or siblings. At the same time, ‘family industry’ comes with pressures, as told in this lace-making song collected from a later period:

One pin have I done to day

What do you think my mother will say?

… when she knows I’ve done no more.

She’ll take and turn me out of doors.

Never let me come in any more.

I’m skeptical about children’s flourishing in household economies, but I’m also not sure about the compartmentalisation of work and home in modern life.

Taking a step back—if industrialisation disrupted these patterns of 17th century life, how do we tally the gains and losses? Just a couple miles from where Alice Clark wrote her classic book, Ivy Pinchbeck taught at Bedford College near Regent’s Park, which later merged with Royal Holloway. Pinchbeck documented the increased dependence of women on male breadwinners after the 17th century. But she thought this also came with benefits, including leisure time. She also argued that when women started participating in wage labour, they were freed from domestic supervision and eventually gained greater rights. The many interpretations of ‘disruption’ reflect the many ways to seek equality. And there’s another approach that pushes against Clark’s picture more fundamentally by proposing a ‘patriarchal equilibrium’ that rides the waves of historical change.

Golden age thinking is limited for these and other reasons, but it can throw up questions for our own time. These pictures from the 1600s show just how integrated motherhood was with other social roles, contrary to the later idealisation and separation of domestic femininity. As for the men, how do we tell the story of their withdrawal from the home as a site of work? In searching for alternatives, a first step is seeing the cornerstones of present arrangements as flotsam from forgotten pasts. I can see why Clark looked backwards to reimagine the patriarchal norms of her Victorian upbringing—her present day—as artefacts of a contained, passing moment.

A simple idea threads through the past century of research: when people do many things in life, they probably are many things at once. Historians began rediscovering these 17th century stories when they focused on tasks rather than identities. When tracking shifting divisions of labour today, we should remember this intuition. The last few instalments of this newsletter were about identity. But focussing too narrowly on that concept obscures what people actually spend their time doing, and how freedom in one sphere of life depends on all the others too.

Share

Subscribe now

This is part three of a loose trilogy on parenthood and identity. It’s not about me, but unlike parts one and two, it’s about where I grew up.

Even on a normal day at home, I sometimes wonder where my passport is. Our ancestors would have been baffled by the anxieties generated by a bit of laminated paper. The modern system of passport control is only a hundred years old, a response to the upheavals of the First World War.

More than travel documents, passports also have to do with nationality and citizenship. I sometimes ask students to use the twists and turns of 20th century nationality law to plot the story of how the sun set on the British empire. One artefact from this story is the British National Overseas (BNO) passport, granted to over 3 million people in Hong Kong between 1987 and 1997. The passport conferred nationality but not citizenship, without the right to live in the UK. Then, on the day Hong Kong was handed from one power to another, it stopped being issued and became a time capsule.

This artefact resurfaced in 2021. After Hong Kong’s National Security Law came into effect, the British government created a special visa for BNO-holders. Over the past four years, more than 160,000 people have settled in the UK through this scheme. The Chinese government responded by making clear that it does not recognise BNO nationality status.

I recently sat down with M.Y., who moved from Hong Kong to Manchester with her husband and daughter in 2023. She hadn’t been a long-time activist. In fact, she’s still perplexed by how little she’d thought about questions of identity. As a child, she accepted the logic of the 1997 handover. As a young adult, she went along with the patriotic displays of the 2008 Olympics.

M.Y. uses the metaphor of ‘fermentation’ to talk about how the protests of 2019 catalysed a change in her self-perception, and how this change could feel both sudden and prolonged. She was among the millions who sympathised with the movement that had previously been spearheaded by a minority. Observations accrued over decades found new expression. At the same time that she discovered a political identity, she learned that the authorities found it unacceptable.

Her daughter’s arrival in 2021 made the crucial difference. Without a child, M.Y. believes that it would have been possible to make peace, if uneasily, with personal and political transformations. She and her husband made good money as hospital nurses. They enjoyed their lifestyle. But when their daughter turned one, they noticed that many friends were emigrating, and they started to make plans. In their minds, they framed their departure as an attempt to find a better environment for their daughter.

The ways in which parenthood differs across societies rarely boil down to one thing. M.Y. was looking for a release valve from the inroads of consumerism into relationships—the ethos that how much you care is how much you spend. She had reservations about an education system whose competitive pressures often pushed children into pure misery. She thought of time as the most valuable thing for a parent, and how little of it was afforded by working hours in Hong Kong.

But she’s emphatic that her unhappiness in Hong Kong had ‘100% to do with politics’. She recoiled viscerally from the surge of national education directed towards young children. If she had stayed, she ‘wouldn’t have dared’ to speak openly about the political environment. She didn’t want her daughter to grow up in an atmosphere of nervousness and fear when the time came to explore these questions, whether among friends, at school or online. She didn’t want there to be ‘one correct answer’.

In the middle of our conversation, M.Y. asked herself a question: why was she unhappy with national education in Hong Kong, but fine with VE-day events at her daughter’s school in Manchester? Part of the answer is about consent and coercion, and the difference it makes to have chosen a political identity. Part of the answer is about abruptness—she simply couldn’t get ‘comfortable’ with the rate of change in Hong Kong. Another part of the answer is a mystery. ‘Double standards’ raise problems, but maybe there’s no single yardstick that can accurately compare what it’s like to live in this or that society.

Our conversation bumped against what I consider to be a central feature of modern history: a divide between the world of citizens and the world of subjects. It’s hard to maintain a sharp divide forever, and many turning-points have come about when the line has been blurred. M.Y.’s generation, which grew up around the 1997 handover, were told a flurry of promises by two regimes based in London and Beijing, and accorded full citizenship by neither. But even broken promises have meaning: why shouldn’t they and their children live under conditions other than those of arbitrary power?

M.Y. doesn’t reject the category of ‘Chinese’. What she can’t stomach is the weaponisation of ethnic sameness to enforce the assimilation of thought and behaviour. It took her time to make these distinctions, and I’m reminded of how long it took for me. Two decades of conscious life, more or less. One factor is that the adjective ‘Chinese’ has an agonising range of meanings in different languages and contexts. M.Y. directs herself towards a civic rather than an ethnic idea of citizenship. She sees her actions on behalf of her daughter as choices towards this idea.

A word that M.Y. brings up repeatedly is ‘awkward’. It’s how she describes the basic condition of Hong Kong identity. It’s a word that historians don’t often write about, probably because it’s easier to sense awkwardness when you are in a room with someone than when you are looking over written records. I think it’s worth dwelling on the word. It suggests that we not only take a bird’s eye view of battles between good and evil, but also focus on looking inside the sticky situations that people try to navigate.

A few years after arriving in the UK, M.Y.’s family has adjusted to their new life. Her daughter enjoys the open spaces and the parks. Like many other overqualified immigrants, one challenge has been finding work. They live with much less disposable income, but everyone in the family seems content.

There is relief, even happiness, in finding a home where each person can explore their sense of identity and belonging. The world at large—and Hong Kong in particular—has been changing so rapidly. M.Y. notes that it’s only normal people struggle to understand the history that they are making, or the history that’s being made of them. But that doesn’t make it any less oppressive when they force ideas upon each other. Her daughter can at least take for granted that thoughts are not crimes.

At the end of our conversation, M.Y. records relief that her husband shares many of her perspectives on identity and parenthood. ‘Fermentation’ isn’t just about the self’s place in the world, it can also make or break couples. They are now expecting another daughter. One day they will tell stories of politics and everyday life in Hong Kong, and why they left—when their children are no longer ‘little balls of rice’, as the Cantonese phrase goes. The kids will have to decide how much to listen and learn, and where and how to belong.

It’s not just that the BNO is a time capsule from another century. Hong Kong itself has often been described as a place on borrowed time. And yet how much life, and how many surprises, can spring between the cracks. The concept of self-determination has been debated and combed over many times over the past century. One aspect that needs more development is that the to-be-determined collective self spans generations. The making of political identity—from ‘balls of rice’ to citizens—requires asking how the past matters and what it takes to envision a future. In the meantime, for many Hong Kong parents, moments of sadness inevitably arise upon reflecting that your children’s happiness will not grow in a place you have known and loved.

Share

Subscribe now

Being a small household doesn’t seem to stop us from buying 30-egg trays from the local farm. Eggs are versatile enough for any time of the day and everyone’s palate. They can transform from raw to cooked with both ease and haste. Having a kid has trained me to get dinner ready in about 20 minutes on weekday evenings. In these colder months, we especially like a simple, warming egg custard.

I was making this dish the other night when, seemingly by telepathy, my sister-in-law suggested that I might write something about it. So here’s a story in the different form of a recipe. Clare is a great chef—when we see each other, the pleasure of eating what she cooks is matched only by that of joining her children in mischief-making. Occasionally I sub in to cook and this dish is often involved, since it goes with almost any East Asian menu.

Steamed eggs are a common dish across Chinese, Korean and Japanese cooking. They can incorporate ingredients across the board—from mushroom to pork and seafood, from shiso leaf to spicy fried shallots. They can be found towards the end of kaiseki or as part of a 15-course Cantonese banquet. They also feature at home, and that’s where I’ve had the most memorable versions.

I’m going to describe the pared-down (though no less delicious) version of the dish, the basis for almost unlimited variation. As with the simplest cooking, making this involves tinkering with the details: ratios, the size and thickness of the bowl, the heat required for the gentlest steam. Because texture is everything, timing is everything. Make this a few times and you’ll develop a new and intimate understanding about the personality of each bowl in your kitchen.

The dish in three steps:

1. Prepare the broth. The broth’s flavour sings through the eggs, so choose your favourite. I often make this dish with dashi, which has a seaweed and seafood base. If I want furikake as a topping, I start the broth with dried kombu in the morning and let it rest. On busy days, I make broth with a dashi teabag when I get home. I also like the version of this dish with chicken stock. For best results, move onto step 2 with broth that is warm but not hot. (And to prepare for step 3, start heating water in the steaming vessel.)

2. Stir the eggs. The ratio of egg to broth is about 1:1.5. I combine the ingredients by eye. When I started making this regularly, I often overestimated the number of eggs that would fit in my bowl. Mix the three ingredients: eggs, soy sauce, broth. This is also the step to add any ingredients you want to cook within the custard. After experimenting with expensive soy sauces, I’ve returned to Lee Kum Kee’s light soy sauce, the Cantonese kitchen staple.

3. Steam. When the water in the steaming vessel is at a simmer, pop in the steaming rack (or improvise with balls of foil). The eggs then go on top. Calibrate the heat to maintain the gentlest simmer, where the bubbles slowly and lazily puncture the surface. Let the eggs cook evenly in a light blanket of steam—the edge should have the same consistency as the centre. Cover the pot/steamer. How long this step takes depends on your bowl, how many eggs you’ve used, and the exact degree of heat you are applying. I usually check after 7-8 minutes, prodding the custard with a fork, and every minute thereafter. Give the dish a few minutes to breathe and rest, then dig in.

The dish isn’t technically difficult, but it asks that you pay attention to how each ingredient works. Eating these eggs is as comforting as slipping your hand into a soft glove on a winter evening, and cooking them multiplies the warmth.

One question is whether to steam the eggs in one bigger bowl or several smaller ones. I do both. It depends on what equipment is available and who I’m cooking for. Smaller bowls allows for customisation without adding time. As I write this, I have a new idea for an activity to do with Clare’s four kids. They can each choose ingredients to add and we’ll have a whole tasting menu of steamed eggs. Impatient children can make us more efficient. Or we can come full circle—slow down and fold them into an afternoon of cooking. ‘Nephew dinner’!

Share

Subscribe now

Winter is a brutal time for war in Ukraine.

The first time I heard the Ukrainian language was also in winter, seven years ago. I was in Kyiv with my friend Sasha, a pianist, to perform a song cycle by the composer Robert Schumann for the first time in Ukrainian. The lyrics had been prepared by Sasha’s mum, Julie, who translates into and from Ukrainian on top of her day job as a statistician in Washington DC. Sasha and I explored the city on foot between rehearsals. Over varenniki dumplings and local dark rye bread, we had time to get into his family stories.

It struck me then, and more forcefully now, that I was coming across not just one family’s odyssey, but also stories that are still unfolding—including the Ukrainian response to the 2022 invasion, and what the war has meant and will mean. When Julie told me that ‘identity is something that I’ve struggled with my whole life’, I couldn’t help but ask more questions. The connection between individual experiences and the sometimes overwhelming forces of history is exactly what this newsletter is about.

This piece explores the intuition that identity is generational rather than fixed, and that we should remember the active component in ‘generational’ is ‘to generate’. It’s a simple intuition, but can be surprisingly difficult to practice in parenthood. And often especially unacceptable to warmongers who latch onto fixed national essences to justify aggression.

Identity is manifold

Julie and Vlad, Sasha’s parents, were born in Kyiv in the 1960s. During the Khruschev thaw, the party leader in Kyiv Petro Shelest found a window to push for the historical and linguistic identity of Ukraine. This came to an end when Leonid Brezhnev came to power, when ‘Ukrainian’ once again became a dangerous adjective. But a legacy had been laid. Julie and Vlad recall that language use during their childhood was ‘personal preference’.

‘Nobody liked Soviet reality.’ Teenage Julie and Vlad sought refuge from it. They looked not for an idea of Ukraine but in search of pre-revolutionary Russian literature. Writers of the ‘Silver Age’ like Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and Mandelstam presented a different reality with wonderful things, things that became objects of fascination for Julie, Vlad and their friends.

But everyday life reminded them that they lived in an existing Ukraine, rather than an imagined Russia. One of Vlad’s most formative memories is kayaking with his family in the summers. His parents took their annual four weeks of vacation all at once. For a month, several families joined together to travel down rivers on kayaks made of leather stretched over steel frames. They sought food from the local peasants and drank milk from the farmsteads. Vlad remembers hearing the spoken Ukrainian of the countryside. Sasha says that his grandfather’s fondest reminiscences were about these summers of fishing, gathering mushrooms and berries, and cooking on open fire.

The theme of discovery and rediscovery surfaces regularly when I speak to Julie and Vlad. It seems to me that identity being manifold makes it all the more real, rather than artificial.

Not Putin’s to defend

Sasha tells me about Mussorgsky, one of his favourite composers, and a letter he wrote in the 1870s:

In Poltava [eastern-central region of Ukraine] the air itself is so gentle as to lull one into a spirit of utter reconciliation and banish even the faintest memory of evil. The poplars are like pyramids—huge guardian angels protecting house, hill, and valley. Delicately the huts with the green and straw-coloured roofs glimpse out of heavy, luscious greenery, scattered here and there among the hills as if by a master painter. It is quiet and calm, the fields are unimaginably gorgeous, as is the sky, and that air, that spell-binding air…

Mussorgsky loved Ukraine. Sasha reminds me that in Mussorgsky’s famous work, Pictures at an Exhibition, the chaotic sounds of the witch Baba Yaga crash harmlessly into Kyiv’s Golden Gates. ‘It is easy to discern who the modern Baba Yaga might be.’ Today, it’s not straightforward to contemplate Mussorgsky’s description of the bucolic countryside, nor the fact that it comes from a Russian artist. Especially when the Poltava region has been shelled by Russian drones over the past weeks.

The war has intensified what we could call the Ukrainian movement for linguistic decolonisation. One joke goes: I went to bed on 23 February 2022 [date in Russian], I woke up on 24 February [date in Ukrainian]. Streets in Kyiv have been renamed. Between themselves, and among old friends, Julie and Vlad sometimes speak Russian as they have for decades. But in public buildings, someone will usually pause and say, there could be Russians around, let’s switch to Ukrainian.

And yet there is some resistance, at least in this family, to wholly divest from the Russian language. There is a desire not to abet Putin’s claim that the invasion was needed to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from linguistic oppression. On a more basic level, there is abhorrence of the appropriation of a literary culture to make war. Julie puts it succinctly: ‘the thing that Putin’s Russia claims to defend is not theirs.’

During Perestroika in the late 1980s, Julie and Vlad lived in Moscow. They missed Kyiv and, contrary to what they were told when growing up, came to see how different it was from other parts of the Soviet Union. After Sasha was born, they would use every opportunity to take the night train and spend time in Kyiv. But Moscow was also exciting at this time: the samizdat, the experimental theatres, the media. As in many other moments, the Russian language flourished in a wave of truth-telling. That too is not something that Putin can claim to defend.

Identities smothered

Among Kyiv’s landmarks, the Brodsky Synagogue stands with a distinct clarity in my memory. Sasha and I stopped in this neighbourhood on a long walk across the city. It was a centre for Jewish settlement in Ukraine, and it’s where Julie grew up. But the building wasn’t even an active synagogue when Julie was a child. With a laugh, she recalls that she knew it as a venue for puppet performances. And this despite her coming, like Vlad, from a Jewish family.

Julie and Vlad’s grandparents were the last generation to speak Yiddish at home and to congregate at the synagogue. They didn’t want to pass on the language. They spoke in hushed tones, if at all, about the Jewish community that no longer existed. They had survived the Holocaust and then lived through Stalin’s ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaigns against Jewish influence. When Julie and Vlad were growing up, they quickly learned about limits on their opportunities. They were told stories about how the Ukrainian Jews could be deported to the ethnic enclave of Birobidzhan, on the border with China near the Pacific Coast.

Families adapt to state-sponsored violence, shaping the fate of future generations. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Julie and Vlad continued to live in Moscow with Sasha. But the economy was terrible, especially for a young family. It seemed impossible to do any business without running into the mafia. They eventually emigrated to the US. They have lived alongside many American Jews, but there’s not much organic connection. Vlad puts it bluntly: ‘They are not our type of Jew. They have totally different experiences.’ It’s difficult to regain a tradition that one hasn’t grown up with.

One window onto Putin’s worldview is his selective reading of Soviet history. He especially dislikes the Bolshevik experiment with national republics, because this (theoretically) acknowledged the existence of separate peoples. To justify this war, he reached back to the 19th century to revive the notion of ‘odin narod’ (one people). A notion to erase Ukraine’s independent existence. This has become one of the most mocked and subverted tropes in Ukrainian comedy and political commentary. It’s as if he was trying to set off a historic wave of creative expression in Ukraine.

Identities awoken

On winter evenings, street lamps cast a harsh light onto the bare trees spread across Kyiv’s Independence Square, the Maidan. A closer look reveals buds that are waiting to bloom.

Sasha can’t recall any Ukrainian at home until the 2014 Maidan revolution. His parents began to speak in Ukrainian, as did their friends. The radio was in Ukrainian instead of Russian. Julie began to translate, discovering contemporary Ukrainian literature along the way. She remembers it as a beautiful and inspiring time.

The idea of a ‘renaissance’ suggests the intermingling of the old and the new, and this captures a current within Ukrainian culture since 2014. Much has been new. In parallel came the rediscovery of historical hinterlands, like the ‘killed renaissance’ (Rozstrilyane Vidrodzhennya) of the 1920s or the dissident groups of the 1960s. The war has reactivated even more buried memories. The ‘intellectual emotions’ of Ukrainian identity, as Vlad puts it, have overflowed from a stream into a river. In Julie’s words, ‘it’s not just political, it’s beautiful.’

Identity as a spiral through generations

Leaving Kyiv with the young Sasha, Vlad recollects, he did not realise how much identity comes not from ideas, but from a big family around you, familiar places, and the land. The family spent some summers in Ukraine—including a kayaking trip that everyone remembers fondly—but the language at home was Russian.

Sasha remembers that it felt cool, as a boy, that his family was from Ukraine. He’s been exploring forgotten corners of Ukrainian music—which is what brought me to Kyiv those years ago. He’s done benefit concerts and is currently part of a production of a classic Ukrainian opera.

But he and his parents would recognise, though in different words, a tension between territorially-bounded and universalistic strains of identity. Vlad talks about how one cannot choose to accept or reject elements of national identity out of personal preference. Sasha wants to situate Ukrainian art within the most universal streams of culture. Julie suggests that Ukraine’s existential struggle is precisely what makes its identity a cosmopolitan one. How these perspectives can be reconciled has significance well beyond one family’s dinner table.

I am reminded from Julie and Vlad’s family stories that their parents and grandparents would have recognised very little of how their lives and identities as Ukrainians have turned out. A couple weeks ago in class, a student made a surprising and (interestingly) off-topic remark that philosophical pessimism follows from not being able to see how future generations can creatively elaborate on the world they inherit.

How war ends: identity from the bottom up

Despite the very serious attempts at social engineering by modern states, identity doesn’t come neatly packaged for easy distribution to ‘the people’. There is a clarity to this fact for the generations that grew up in the Soviet Union, who have an ingrained sense of resistance to top-down edicts. And the moral force of Ukrainian patriotism over the past decade, for Julie and Vlad, has very much been bottom-up.

A few months before the 2022 invasion, Putin published an article in which he claimed that Ukrainians and Russians were ‘one people’. He justified this view of mystical ‘blood ties’ by talking about how ‘our kinship has been transmitted from generation to generation’. Before 2022, many Ukrainian parents had already refused for their children to be pawns in such a story about intergenerational transmission. Many more have redoubled their efforts since the beginning of this war.

Even if the war’s end is decided behind closed doors, how it ends will shape many generations of Ukrainians. One lesson from history is that the period after war can be more painful than wartime. Julie remembers her grandfather’s stories about a great hunger around 1946. He had been well-fed in the army, but came home to find ruins and starvation. Even those who have enough to eat will have to regain their physical—and psychological—shelter. One of the Ukrainian writers Julie has translated is Victoria Amelina. She was killed two years ago by Russian bombing, and had written this war poem for children:

The house fits into your pocket

and there she sleeps

The house should only be taken out

when it is safe

When you’re ready

The house will gradually grow

So that you’ll never,

remember,

you’ll never

be without your home

And what did you take with you?

I took only this story

about coming back

Here, I pulled it out to light

It is growing

Share

Subscribe now

The mountains are big. Then one looks up, and the sky is bigger still. That image of Tibet lingers on my mind, a decade after my first and only time there. The thin air at altitude charged each detail with energy: each interaction, each bite of food, each time one valley gave way to another. Contradictions were juxtaposed—between the rhythms of nomadic or village life and the march of ‘development’ from the east, between the extraordinary cultural mix of inner Asia and modern political borders. As a result, I felt like I was encountering a people that was at once ephemeral and ancient.

This November, I’m writing about parenthood and identity. I’ve always been drawn to places where identities form under duress, even on a brink of non-existence, like your sense of your own life when you walk alone and come across feral Tibetan mastiffs—stories for another time. I’m interested in how people get caught up in fragmented worlds not of their own making, how they find home under such conditions, and how they fashion ideas about the future of their family and society. I’m especially excited about this week’s story, having thought about it for some time.

Whenever we get the chance, we go to eat on Magdalen Road in Oxford. Along the brown and grey Victorian terraced houses is the dark blue frontage of Taste Tibet. Before stepping into Julie and Yeshi’s restaurant, my mind and stomach are already working together to imagine the momos in the steamer. I like to sit down on one of their long benches with both the beef and vegetable options, alternate between them, and splash on homemade chilli paste and soy sauce with chives. On special occasions, they serve momos on a giant paella pan outside, assisted by their kids. What’s better than a dumpling party? .

Yeshi’s hometown is in Kham, the Tibetan plateau’s eastern edge. From his mother, he learned to make—and learned to enjoy making—momos with fresh vegetables. With his father, he herded yaks and sheep into the highlands, and cooked the family recipes in tents far from home. At the end of a yak’s life, no part was wasted: the milk had been churned, the meat was cured, the skin used for shoes and bags, and the tail became a duster.

For many centuries, and for many reasons, Tibetans have been traversing the Himalayas. The tallest mountain range in the world makes it difficult to predict the next crossing. Yeshi learned this fact when he left Tibet in 1999 to help his younger brother settle into a monastery in India. They walked for 24 days. Yeshi ended up staying in Dharamsala and didn’t see his family for 17 years. He lived among many Tibetans, since India has the largest diaspora. But he cooked with new vegetables, spices and techniques.

Julie grew up in London. She made the then-unusual decision to study Chinese at university, after which she worked in Beijing. On a work trip to India, she visited McLeod Ganj, a small town in the mountains. She turned onto a footpath to take photos of a Himalayan langur, a shy monkey with a silver coat. A few steps ahead of her was Yeshi, also capturing the langur with a camera. They got chatting. Today, they live in Oxford with their two teen children.

My regular order at the restaurant is a platter of momos with a bowl of dal and a mug of masala chai on the side. These sides come from Yeshi’s decade of experimenting with cooking in India. The falling-apart lentals are just at the consistency that does so well to soothe towards the end of an autumn day. The chai is just as I like it, smooth and cheerful but still fiery. Despite Jo’s attempts to defend the versions served in British cafés, I can’t come around to those syrupy concoctions—what I’d call the ‘Christmas 365 days a year’ kind of chai.

While researching my doctoral dissertation, I came across a Tibetan song. It was sung in 1934, in a great wooden hall where people sat on rugs to eat dinner:

Here we are, we’ve come from our hills far in the south

We’ve left behind our parents, our sisters and brothers

How will we return and what will our parents, our sisters and brothers say?

How worried will they be about us so far away?

Is home moveable? There’s no sidestepping the question for Julie and Yeshi’s family in East Oxford. Three months after Yeshi’s arrival in the UK, Julie gave birth to their son. Three years later in 2014, they welcomed their daughter to the world, and also started a food stall to bring Yeshi’s cooking to Oxford. Julie soon left her job as an editor and Taste Tibet became full-time for both. Food is still a way for Yeshi to mentally connect with Tibet, and it’s also grown into other ways of making a home: a livelihood and something to share with their kids.

Cooking one’s way home isn’t just about what we can see, or even what we can taste. It also touches on a way of life. When Yeshi first arrived in the UK, he was shocked by the ‘me first’ attitude at meals—the unattractive habits of poking around a dish for a preferred piece, or saving the tasty food for the grown ups. In his mind, when a family gathers around the table, the best bits should go to the tiny people and the elderly.

The ethos of sharing is about making food as well as eating food. What momos served on a platter don’t reveal is that they’re rarely made by a single person in Tibet, especially in large households where cooking is something you do together. Once the kids were old enough, Yeshi involved them with preparing food at home. The point is not that one person is doing a favour for another. Instead, it’s that sustaining life is an inherently collaborative effort. Yeshi has a pithy phrase for those who don’t see the value in this ethos: ‘sorry for them.’

Julie and Yeshi reflect on compromises between sharing food with people and making time for the kids, who have grown up around the rhythms of a small business. When the food stall was getting started, Julie strapped the baby to her back and carefully timed the nap in the pram for the busy lunch hour. Now, with dinner service at the restaurant, Yeshi is out several nights a week. Happily, Julie reports, the kids enjoy the different flavours from her repertoire.

When I ask about her favourite Tibetan dish, Julie doesn’t hesitate: thenthuk. Long stretches of dough are hand-pulled and pinched into noodles, then throw into broth. The noodle soup can be topped with meat, veg or an egg. ‘It’s a big warm hug every time', she says. The soup first warms the hands that clasp the bowl, then washes away the cold in the bones.

Julie’s fondness for thenthuk reminds me of my most memorable meal in Tibet. I had arrived at Nyainrong in northern Tibet. Finally overcome with altitude sickness at 5000m, I spent a day in bed. I walked out the next morning for a bowl of steaming beef noodle soup. Maybe there is something different about Tibetan salt flats, because the flavour in the broth came through with nourishing simplicity. Sitting there with the noodles also gave me an excuse to stay by the road and watch life unfold.

Food connects the kids to their parents and to Tibet. It’s a mobile part of home, more portable than the sense of place that comes from living somewhere for years. Yeshi’s dishes communicate a set of personal and family histories—windows onto worlds that are far away from growing up in Oxford. Julie and Yeshi have brought the kids to see their Tibetan family thrice, twice in China outside the family home and once to where Yeshi grew up. Without fluency in Tibetan, expressing enjoyment at mealtime is one of the few ways that the kids can communicate with family members.

Unlike most Chinese cuisines, Tibetan meals make the most of dairy. The typical Tibetan meal is also much quieter. There is a time to chat, but it is usually before or after eating. Yeshi still gets cross if the kids bring books or toys to the table. He explains that the Buddhist worldview values silent respect for the effort behind a meal, even if there are no formal prayers. Otherwise, he says, ‘your mind is not on the food’.

The kids don’t identify at all as Chinese. They’ve been to China and drawn their own conclusions. Their son has become a very political 14-year old. At the same time, they have good Chinese friends at school in Oxford, where they’re also learning the language. Without formal channels to learn Tibetan, the best bet to communicate with their own generation in Tibet is to speak Chinese.

The kids’ go-to dish is bhatsa marku, Tibetan gnocchi. Cubed pieces of dough cooked in butter and spring onion, with mushrooms or meat. Julie describes it as ‘comfort in one bowl’. I agree. And maybe because I now cook for a small child, I get an extra geometric pleasure from chopping ingredients to the same size. Now in their teens, the kids don’t just consume dad’s food, but also participate in sustaining the business and the meaning behind the recipes.

The family hasn’t entirely left nomadic life behind. Every summer, Julie and Yeshi pack the kitchen and the kids into the truck. They drive all around the UK, bringing Taste Tibet to festivals and markets. The kids are old enough to know the system and are now a core part of the team. They’ve become confident with people. ‘They’re watching everything’, as Julie says—they’ve seen their parents deal with difficult situations and come away with positive exchanges. They know how it feels to be useful and why that is satisfying. ‘Involving the kids in this way was never part of a plan, but it’s provided shared memories of working together and other inadvertent benefits.

Every family has their own history of the dinner table. Julie and Yeshi started with getting the kids to taste all kinds of food, whether raw or cooked. As the kids got older, they talked more about the world and their place in it. They are now seeing the world through their own eyes and coming up with their own expressions of identity. Their daughter told Julie yesterday: ‘Mum, I love being mixed. I’ve got different perspectives and I know things that my friends don’t know.’

Depending on how you count, running a busy restaurant has given Julie and Yeshi more, or less, quality time with their kids. What occurs to me is not so much how to measure time but how to live with a sense of purposeful effort that can communicated between parent and child. In many families, as in many groups of people, it seems like agency is a zero-sum game. Someone’s agency threatens another’s. Or nobody feels any agency. When Yeshi says ‘without food we can’t live’, I think not just about the survival need to feed people, but also about food as a way to build up agency together.

Tonight, I’m making bhatsa marku from Julie and Yeshi’s cookbook. Ren has always liked watching me cook while strapped to my chest. She’s getting more curious to touch and taste the ingredients. Maybe we’ll even throw in a dash of Taste Tibet’s sepen, chilli oil, and see how she’s doing with spice tolerance, that most important milestone.

Share

Subscribe now

Tuesday—sunny

Autumn and the academic term are both in full swing. The streets overflow with students rather than tourists. They are also smothered in red and brown foliage. My daughter shows me the boundless joy of stomping on crunchy leaves. It’s more than seven years since Jo and I arrived in Oxford, by far the longest that either of us has lived anywhere as an adult.

I’m especially enjoying teaching two groups of first years. There’s something special about welcoming someone to a new place and a new chapter of life. Like when I ask what they’ve most enjoyed in their first weeks, and one of them says exploring the libraries, and the others knowingly chuckle at the conceit. With one of these groups, I’ve been reading the works of Alexis de Tocqueville.

The 19th century Frenchman came from an old aristocratic family but became obsessed with the ingredients of modern democratic culture. There are quite a few ways in which his writings can inform the history of parenthood. He was convinced that the only way to understand his own society was to observe and compare other parts of the world. This led him to look at the ‘spirit of association’ in Britain and the United States, which he found strikingly different from France. He arrived at the view that democracy was sustained not so much by abstract ideals but by rooted communities and local associations.

He warned that the more we take institutions for granted, the less active we are in forming associations. He was talking not just about ‘political’ associations, but groups with all kinds of purposes—community businesses, sports groups, book clubs. All of these associations defend us against top-down visions and encourage a view of society as a shared enterprise. As far as I can tell, this also applies to the associational dimension of parenthood.

In the colder months, it’s often dark when I finish and glance up at the west-facing window in my office. I know the sunsets must be lovely, because I’ve seen quite a few students zone out and look past my head in a mesmerised daze. I pick up Ren from nursery on the way home.

There’s a plaque outside the nursery that commemorates its founding in 1992. Even fully professionalised childcare settings frequently have associational origins—often groups of mothers working together to find solutions to balance work and life. (It only took about a millennium of institutional history and several decades of active campaigning for Oxford to set up university nurseries.)

Thursday—rain and some sun

It’s my day with Ren. In the morning, we go to a ‘stay and play’ with our friend Marla, also 1.5 years old, and her dad Luke. The kids are just about old enough to play together. Marla shows Ren how to make tea in the play kitchen. Ren demonstrates the art of frenetic hopping on and off tricycles. The playgroup is in the community centre where we met Marla’s parents, when we were in an antenatal class. We all reward ourselves with sausage rolls after playing. The sun comes out for a few minutes and we run onto the playground.

Our days with Ren would be a lot duller if not for a dense web of playgroups in the area. I like to do a combination of roaming around—what I call ‘playground/playgroup tourism’—and regular attendance. Most of these groups are free or very affordable. (I can’t help but smile when ordering a portion of beans and cheese for £0.50 in 2025.) Some of the volunteers now know Ren by name, personality—and pitch.

One of the spots we visit regularly is called Florence Park. We discovered it accidentally when we had some time to spare before a pregnancy ultrasound. We then went back with the antenatal class when everyone was expecting, and have since returned with the kids. There’s a community hub in the park with a café and a 10/10 playground, as well as a children’s nursery and a midwife unit.

The space is a former children’s centre that was shut down about 10 years ago due to government funding cuts. The community midwives refused to relocate to the main hospital. A group of people in the neighbourhood and a local charity developed a business plan. The hub began with two part-time staff and now employs over 40 people across a range of small enterprises.

Parenthood is about common life, in two senses. Common as in ordinary, and common as in shared. I’ve never liked spaces and events that are age-segregated. This aversion has become even stronger since I’ve had a kid. Often it takes bottom-up action to ensure that spaces stay accessible for open forms of association.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the ways in which voluntary action gets squeezed out between our work and home lives. We both have toddlers. One day, it would be good to contribute more to the civic life from which we and our children benefit so much.

In the afternoon, Ren and I go check on her animal friends. Depending on the season, the countryside around us is home to goats (‘maaaaaaa’), chicken (‘buck buck’) and horses (‘ma ma’, in Cantonese). She can easily spend hours communing with them. If we are seriously thinking about the web of associations in which parenting takes place, we should probably look beyond the human species.

Saturday—windy

The best time to meet friends at the village playground is on weekdays after school, or on weekends. Ren is especially attached to the sisters who live across the street, aged two and eight. They walk off in a line like ducklings to explore some obscure part of the hedgerow. They follow no ‘mother duck’ but instead trail after each other in mysterious patterns.

We recently visited the village school, where Ren can go when she turns three. The school was founded in 1704 by the parish rector. It is so close to us that we share a garden wall. At the end of the tour, we talk to parent volunteers whom we already know from the playground.

We’ve seen schools that are set in the heart of natural landscapes, and we’ve seen schools that have inspiring pedagogies. The special thing about a village school is something else: that it is collaborative and anchored in the community. Even though the school is funded by the state, it is also the result of participation and improvement by local people over centuries.

There are darker sides to the ‘spirit of association’. One of our neighbours, Basil, volunteers to mow a patch of grass outside our back gate. The last time I spoke with Basil, he was 92 years old. He told me the story of how he married into the village in the 50s. But he wasn’t allowed to join the village cricket club because he was an outsider—from the next village. Basil talked about how it took many years for the village to become a welcoming place. I thought of his story when reading Tocqueville’s observations of England:

I see many things in this country which I cannot yet completely understand, among others this: Two spirits which, if not altogether contrary, are at least very diverse, seem to hold equal sway in England. The one prompts people to pool their efforts to attain ends which in France we would never think of approaching in this way. The other prompts each man and each association to keep all advantages as much as possible to themselves, to close every possible door that would let any outsider come in or look in.

Tocqueville’s praise of the ‘spirit of association’ wasn’t one-sided. He was interested in how it had become ‘so intimately combined’ with ‘the spirit of exclusion’. It seems true enough that association involves the ‘art of separation’ to create distinct spheres of life. What the idea of voluntary association doesn’t spell out enough are the ethos of inclusion and the psychology of loyalty.

After we return from the playground, my parents and cousin arrive to visit us. They are jet-lagged from a long flight but immediately spring into action so that Jo and I can take a moment to refresh and reconnect. Is it the case that family life doesn’t just take place within voluntary associations like the ones I’ve mentioned, but is itself a form of association? The question seems laughable at first, when I think about how our kid has no choice but to be with us.

But there is merit in emphasising the ‘voluntary’ dimension of family life. It is essential to my wellbeing that I was not pressured to become a parent. One day our kid will separate from us—whether artfully or brashly—and we will all have to negotiate what kind of uncoerced association we seek with each other. And yet even that is not the end of the story. Because to act freely is not the same as acting on one’s whim. We are fortunate when we see a bigger picture to our own actions. When Tocqueville analysed the strange relationship between the spirit of association and the ‘spirit of individuality’, he gave the example: ‘see how families divide up when the birds are able to leave the nest.’ Individuality is necessary but not sufficient for freedom.

Share

Subscribe now

Once in a while, we all need to pause and get some music going. It might be your go-to playlist on the headphones, or making some noise on your favourite instrument, or singing your heart out in the shower. Then the day can keep going. It turns out that parenting isn’t so different from the rest of life.

The past few weeks have been trickier with obvious and non-obvious illnesses, the full bloom of toddler tantrums, and confusing attempts to communicate on the cusp of language. Connecting with her has been more difficult than usual. One exception has been music. It’s not just useful for specific tasks, like coaxing her to sleep or getting her to sit still for a meal. It’s also been one of the few things that help her reset when she’s emotionally overwhelmed. And it’s been one of the few things that spark joy when she’s calmed.

Her current preferred musical style is slap guitar. She claps along or joins with the tambourine. Or she does a whirling dance, or bounces on her knees. When learning about childhood milestones, I never registered jumping. For someone who can’t yet lift herself off the ground, bouncing is a fun substitute. She’s got a great sense of slapstick humour about music. If toddlers were filmmakers, they’d probably be Charlie Chaplin. The question is how to keep the comedy alive inside them.

Last week, I went to a headline show with our friend Michael’s band, My Mercury. The rarity of going out after ‘bedtime’ accentuates the special treat of live music. What’s better than listening to your friends make music then chatting between sets in the pub garden on an autumn night? The band played their single that they’d released just the day before. Geezer that I now am, I couldn’t help thinking about going to shows with my kid when she’s older, or better yet, going to her shows. Wonder what kind of band she’ll be in.

More than my own experience, Ren’s responses have made me think about the psychology of live music. Songs on the speakers are better than nothing. On car rides we’re graduating from nursery rhymes and she’s enjoying a playlist my brother made for her. But what really reaches her is music that’s made right there in the room. I’d guess that it has something to do with how genuine play involves experimenting with cause and effect. It’s easier to tap into that when music is a full-bodied experience. As I told Michael after the show, the best thing was seeing him activate.

In the few years before I became a parent, life took different turns and I spent less time playing music than in any period I can remember. Now most of the live music in my life is whatever we make at home. Especially when she was younger, there was a lot of singing her to sleep. In the middle of the night, I’d find myself wondering how music interacted with her consciousness. What did moving pitches around in this or that direction do? Why did singing at a high or low register have different effects? And what came first, music or language?

A certain Charles Darwin asked himself some similar questions almost 200 years ago. With the difference that he was delirious from seasickness rather than sleep-deprivation. From Plymouth, a few hours’ drive from where we live, he set sail on the HMS Beagle in 1831 to observe the world. He developed the idea that humans share fundamental intuitions with most animal species. That includes musical intuitions, which he believed to be continuous with ‘songs’ from the smallest bird to the largest whale. He suspected this had to do with the origins of language. He scribbled in his notebooks:

did our language commence with singing—is this the origin of our pleasure in music—do monkeys howl in harmony?

Darwin took a few decades to think through these revelations, which were published in 1871 as The Descent of Man. The ‘very ancient arts’ of music, dance, song and poetry must have been part of human history ‘at a very remote period’, he wrote. His claim was that music came before language. He was arguing against seeing music as an accessory by-product of speech, what researchers today call the ‘auditory cheesecake’ view of music. Contemporary neuroimaging techniques show how shared neural mechanisms underlie both music and language, though we’re still hazy on the details of their earliest co-evolution. When observing my daughter, I’ve been thinking about this interplay as much as I’ve been tracking the acquisition of words. As far as I can tell, babies don’t just respond to music. From the start, they put rhythm and pitch into their babbling.

Archaeologists tell us that the origins of instrumental music go back at least 40,000 years, when rhythm and pitch had become integrated. In 1995, a team unearthed a ‘Neanderthal flute’ from 60,000 years ago. The experts still debate whether this piece, made from the thighbone of a bear, was used to play music. If it was, that suggests a period of music history before Homo Sapiens became the only human species on the planet.

For all his adventures, Darwin had a surprisingly domesticated view of what music does: ‘Music arouses in us various emotions, but not the more terrible ones of horror, fear, rage, etc. It awakens the gentler feelings of tenderness and love.’ This seems misleading on a key point. Music transports. That’s why it can be a thread to draw a toddler out of a tantrum. It’s also why music can open up whole worlds of the imagination, some of which are unfamiliar and even frightening.

The story of the Pied Piper is probably based on a real event in 1284, when about 130 children vanished from the German town of Hamelin. The forces that draw people—including children—into the world often don’t fit into neat schemes. Darwin was right when he wrote that the faculty of music-making ‘must be ranked amongst the most mysterious’.

Almost every morning, Ren goes into the living room and plays a few beats on our djembe. I like to think that this ritual is for her what my first cup of coffee is for me. There are many stories behind why the djembe became her ‘first’ instrument. One of them is that I took lessons many years ago in Hong Kong. I was 16, tired of the city and tired of school. Every Sunday, I took a ferry out to Lamma Island and played the djembe with Makha Diop.

Makha lives on Lamma because it reminds him of where he grew up: Gorée Island in Senegal, just off the coast of Dakar. The djembe was part of community life, but he only started playing ‘properly’ at 15. His mother wasn’t too keen on drumming—she didn’t see a future in it. He’s now taught the djembe in Hong Kong for over two decades. He tells me that he especially likes teaching kids and giving them a shared moment with their parents. It’s one of the few ways for them to step away from their devices.

During covid, Makha founded a music and culture association called Sankofa. Too many people badly needed a space to connect with themselves and with other people. The word Sankofa, which means ‘to retrieve’, comes from the Ghanaian Akan language. It’s associated with a proverb: ‘go back to move forward’. Makha says that the concept isn’t just about going back in historical time. It’s also about going back to the psychological roots.

Djembe music is decisively joyful. Gorée Island, a centre of the transatlantic slave trade, has a grim history. Makha’s interpretation of Sankofa helps me understand how these facts coexist. The past is there as a thick web of traditions to draw from. It is not there to defeat us. There are many reasons not to focus on joy when looking out at the world today. My daughter will have many years to seek answers in music for grief, anger and sorrow. But if music can start by fuelling her internal joy, that feels like all we can ask for.

I enjoy projects. Like this newsletter. Or getting Ren to explore instruments, or developing ways to resolve emotional difficulties with her. But music and parenthood are alike in that they are ultimately not projects. They are forms of connection.

We know from adult life how people can share amazing experiences of music without a common language. The layers of expression in music remind me that parenthood is about making shared meaning. The human desire to connect always seems to exceed what we can put into words.

It may seem like toddlers, more than the rest of us, live in the zone between verbal and non-verbal communication. My take is that we might compartmentalise these channels as adults, but the zone in between never disappears. In fact, I love that zone. It is ancient. Each moment of making music is an echo of the dawn of life.

p.s. As this immortal rendition of the Anpanman theme song suggests, we have every reason to take kids’ music seriously.

Share

Subscribe now

Look up at the sky and pay close attention: if you’re lucky, you might see some celestial beings of great power and speed called asuras. The second thing you might notice is that the greater their power, the more intense their feuds. Asuras constantly remind themselves of how much better life could have been. These hormonal super-heroes, or villains, are consumed by unquenchable jealousy. The 6th-century monk Zhiyi said of them:

Always desiring to be superior to others, having no patience for inferiors and belittling strangers; like a hawk, flying high above and looking down on others, and yet outwardly displaying justice, worship, wisdom, and faith—this is raising up the lowest order of good and walking the way of the Asuras.1

More refined and subtle than asuras are other celestial beings called devas. They experience forms of pleasure that are the farthest removed from suffering. They live for a long time, sometimes millions or billions of human years. They are literally partying in heaven. In Sanskrit, devas are “the radiant ones”. In Chinese, they are called 天人, sky people.

Asuras and devas also exist in Hinduism, but the Buddhist worldview has different descriptions of these beings. Everyone, whether celestial or human, has its place in a hierarchy based on merit and karma. Devas are not created as demigods but earn their good fortune at the top of a cosmic meritocracy. But even the best party comes to an end. Devas are subject to impermanence like all beings. It is said that their deaths are especially painful and frightening, because of the bliss that they have come to enjoy.

Even the most elevated deva is part of this hierarchy and is not free from it. Some stories of the devas also speak of their obstacles to wisdom. There is less urgency to address the problems of life. Indulgence becomes habitual. They can be proud and arrogant, because it is easier to look down on inferiors than to consider what remains work-in-progress in oneself. No matter how you look at it, the realm of devas cannot be the final destination.

The more blissful their lives, the more likely they are to stay in their happy abodes. Our world disgusts them—a rotting heap of meaningless misfortune. Counterintuitively, humans may be in a better position to grow in wisdom, stretched as we are between a chance for enlightenment and suffering everywhere.

We can admire these advanced beings but not at the expense of focusing on being human. At the end of the day, asuras, devas and humans are more similar than at first glance. Some cry, some laugh. The greatest deity and the smallest human live in the mosh pit of perishable existence. No celestial being can save us from ourselves.

Depending on who you ask, celestial beings play various parts in society. In parts of Thailand and Bangladesh, they are the addressees of sky lanterns, small hot-air balloons made of paper. In Myanmar, they feature in the annual Thadingyut Festival. When Buddhism arrived in Japan, they interacted with kami, the Shinto deities. A lot of online traffic about asuras and devas comes from people who have just come across them in manga or video games.

I first heard about them in 2013 when I stayed at a monastery for a couple weeks in Jiangxi, China. My roommate was a nice man in his 60s from Shanghai who found faith in retirement. He diligently explained the Buddhist worldview to me so that I might convert. He liked to remind me that his son didn’t follow his path—maybe that’s why he put in the extra effort with me. I took many things from our conversations, though probably not what he intended. It was liberating to hear the Buddhist warning that moving up a hierarchy will not free you from it. True freedom is so hard that no great cosmic being can claim it. And yet the seed of freedom is in each person, no farther than your own jugular vein.

When I lived in Chicago and wanted a change of scenery, I would wander down to the Buddhist sculpture section at the Art Institute. I liked seeing what beautiful things people could make out of stone. It was interesting to see when and where a particular deity shows up, but even more interesting to me was what the sculptures said about the people who made them. More than the tale of Icarus, among others, I’ve found this Buddhist story to reveal insights about the exquisite state of being human. More so than in 2013, parents today are aware of the uncertain world that children are entering. The lucky ones among us have access to things and technologies that can manage acute suffering. But there is no escape from the human condition.

Share

Subscribe now