The Bright Places

Hello from Vermont, where the sun is high and the late summer wildflowers bloom against a backdrop of deep green northern woodlands. This morning, I sat in the middle of those flowers and managed to forget for a few minutes that the world is upside down.

Those minutes are precious, because since the day my school visits and speaking events disappeared in a haze of COVID-infused vapor, I’ve struggled to find the bright places.

Everyone is hurting, and I don’t want to downplay just how bad it’s been for kids, and especially poor kids and kids of color but I need to write today to share a few things that have brought me happiness in the past couple of months.

I share them in the hope that they might bring you a bit of happiness, too.

Dinner does not make me happy anymore. I still love cooking, but dinner just keeps coming, and coming, and coming AGAIN, every damn day. It’s relentless. To complicate matters, our summer household included one vegan, one vegetarian, one carnivore, and me, the delightful and flexible member of the family. I managed to kill both my dinnertime frustration and my newfound insomnia with one stone: Chinese cooking videos on YouTube.

Oh, how I love Liziqi. Her videos are a cross between ASMR and a personal tour of fantasyland. I look forward to bedtime all day long when I know she’s posted a new video. To refer to Liziqi as a cooking channel is to underestimate her magical powers to create, inspire, and soothe. In her video about rice, she cultivates the land, plants the rice, harvests and threshes the rice, then prepares twelve different dishes for her grandmother. She raises silkworms and turns their cocoons into a duvet cover. She dyes fabric with plants and makes her own clothes. She builds bread ovens that look like cats, makes furniture out of bamboo and generally inspires me to do things it never occurred to me to do.

I also love Dianxi Xiaoge, who forages for mushrooms in the mountains of Yunnan, hand-grinds soybeans for various treats I’d never seen before, and makes this crazy moldy hairy tofu I’m never going to eat but delight in watching her make.

The most practical videos, the ones that have resurrected my will to cook, are made by a lovely couple who live in in Shenzen, China. Chris (ex-pat from the U.S.) and Steph (from Guangzhou) are Chinese Cooking Demystified. My favorite videos, and a great place to start watching, are on the difference between western and authentic MaPo Tofu, Sichuan tofu rice, and a little jar of magic called Lao Gan Ma, the new love of my life (apologies, Liziqi).

Until I find all the ingredients needed to make my own at home, I was able to source three varieties of prepared Lao Gan Ma at a very small but well-stocked Asian market near me. I bought both Spicy Chili Crisp and Fried Chili in Oil, which has bits of crispy tofu and peanuts. I can’t begin to describe how delightful these sauces are, and a tiny bit goes a long way. Even if you don’t love spicy food, I beg you to try it. It’s not as spicy as you would think, and it’s a game-changer. Trust me. Chris and Steph even made a video about how Lao Gan Ma plus rice is all you need in life.

On the days just can’t handle cooking, we have what we call “scavenging nights,” and I eat an ever-changing selection of local fruit. Peaches, local blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries have sustained me. My local berry farm closed on Saturday and I’m working my way through my last quart of blueberries as I write this.

Yes, I have found happiness in things that are not edible.

My former middle school student, Hannah Lang, published her first opinion piece, “Gen Z is not the COVID Problem: Constantly Highlighting Young People’s Mistakes is Counterproductive” and I nearly burst with pride.

My husband Tim and I published a feature in a special print section of the Washington Post, “Back to School in a Pandemic: A Guide to the Factors Keeping Parents and Educators Up at Night.” Tim covered the medical angle, I covered the education side, and worked so hard on it. At one point our outline was twice as long as our allowable final word count so, yay us.

My new book, The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence has cover art and a publication date! Covers make a book real, whis is wonderful, but my assigned pub date made me happy because of the person I get to share it with. In 2015, another book about overparenting, How to Raise An Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims, came out around the same time as The Gift of Failure. Despite the fact that Julie was my direct competition, I was fated to fall in love with her, first because we had a student in common, and later because I learned she’s one of those magical people who make the world a better place as she moves through it. She cares deeply for kids and we share a mission: to help kids find their voices, their identities, and their paths.The Addiction Inoculation and Julie’s new book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult will be released on April 6, 2021. I have to admit, I got a little weepy when I found out.

I hope the small bright places I’ve discovered this summer bring you a glimmer of happiness too.

Be safe, and be well, dear readers.