Monday, July 19, 2010
The Extremely Particular Girl With The Golden Touch
Natalie loves grapes--except for the imperfect, not-completely-green ones and the ones at the very bottom of the bunch, which look a little squished. Indeed, I'm happy to say that she does have a couple of fruits she likes (no vegetables of note, except peas and corn, the latter which we scarcely eat here in Korea because it's scarcely available out of the can; the former which we never do because it's never been sighted by me outside the can), watermelon being one, except for the seeds and the stuff too close to the rind. Apples she loves, peeled and cut up; otherwise not: she can't bring herself to bite into a whole one. Yogurt is pleasant to her, but it has to be the smooth kind, with no fruit; in Korea, all fruit-flavored yogurt we've found contains 'real' fruit pieces.Natalie will happily go with me to get a pizza, but insists that it not be made in typical Korean fashion--WITH corn (and what Western soul wouldn't?). She only wants to have the cheese crust pizzas, though. But then, she only ever eats the cheese crusts, anyway; well, she nibbles ONE cheese crust from ONE triangle of pizza, nevertheless claiming for herself all the cheese crusts. If I don't pack them up and take them home with us, I'll end up eating them myself. If I do take them home, they sit in cold storage until I throw them out or, yes, eat them myself, because she favors them less as the grow older. Net slices of pizza eaten, with crusts: Me, 8/Natalie: a nibble or two.
In Korea, Natalie takes on my wife's and my own penchants for avoiding spicy foods, the quizzical yet forbidding abundance of the sea Koreans (to name one culture) take for culinarily granted; the one typically Asian food she will eat is Ramen noodles. I buy the long spaghetti type in bags; she insists upon those and pasta--plain. She's never liked red sauce, and here, especially, where every sauce seems tinged with some spiciness, she turns away. She's eaten Alfredo sauce from a jar, but now doesn't like the 'black spots (pepper)' that appear in the sauce we get, so that's out, too.
she hasn't seen us overindulge in any meats at all: pork, a national staple, is out for us. We eat chicken and, occasionally, red meat, overwhelmingly hamburger. There's no turkey to be had here, except at Subway Sandwich Shops, and the cost of that is hardly ever justifiable. Anyway, no matter on the meat end, because Natalie has never in 4 years and 7 months eaten bite one of any meat at all, be it cattle, fish or fowl. We did mount a prolonged insistence during one evening meal before we came to Korea, when she was two, and succeeded in getting her to touch a small bite of chicken with her tongue. But she hasn't given meat a second thought, mostly.
So, our Natalie is fussy about food, but I'd like to attribute all that to a combination of pure childhood and a year and more of childhood outside the cultural confines of her birth country. There are certain things she is living without: a usual circle of friends, the ability to immediately and confidently communicate with the general public, the comfort of blending in to the populace without garnering the attention that Koreans hand out. In fact, attention is the best she's been able to gather in; everybody seems eager to associate with her, but kids especially don't attempt to get close. Though I realize that she's not in a position to nurture friendships now, she doesn't, and she deems everyone she plays with for more than five minutes a trusted companion. So, recently, when she encountered on a playground an English-speaking Korean girl about 3 years her senior (older girls are invariably the ones most bold in engaging her), she took it to heart when that girl made an appointment to meet her again on that same playground at a certain day and time. She spoke of it many times until the day came. Near the appointed time, she suddenly sat down with her toys and began playing fervently with her toys. I had to take the initiative to get her out the door, and I took it as a sign not of forgetfulness nor nonchalance, but of childish fear of the contact she desired. She needn't have feared. For her own reasons, the other girl never showed up. Natalie knew the direction the girl had taken in farewell the night they had parted, toward a surrounding high-rise apartment in a complex that hosted the playground, so after the allotted time I indicated that we would wait, she began to move in that direction, intending to find her. But nothing was certain, and I found myself explaining the virtues of having one's own agenda when faced with others who function according to theirs, or to none. How little or much she heard me I can't immediately say, but she's sharp enough to have a subconscious that will aid her as time goes by. So, I tell her what is needful, not minding about immediately observed results.
Our daughter does, however, have her true companions, and needs them in the absence of her true confidante, her mother; she needs a substitute to dote upon while she is separated from the infant baby sister she's experienced only via web cam. So her menagerie of stuffed animals provides a companionship that she can count on. Especially Funshine Bear is dear to her, and she would take him everywhere inside and out, if her parents' agreement didn't restrict him to this side of the apartment door. He's not the first Funshine she's had. The first, I must admit, was lost when we did have him out gadding about with us, so, at her mother's request, this second one, garnered from the Ebay internet site and just as eagerly anticipated as a reunion with any other friend; this nearly exactly equal one--visibly, it is identical, but now Funshine has phrases to speak, if we only had the batteries; silent, however, I think that it's status as the successor Funshine is as much an endearment to Natalie as the last one. If my wife will now only accept my apology for losing the first one, a gift from her to me, everything will revolve again in its accustomed universe.
In my estimation, the reason her toys and animals mean so much to her is that 1. they are there whenever she wants and needs their companionship in a world where people are the X factor, and 2. she has the imagination to fill her toy world with effervescent life. I, being, again, her only constant live and present soul, am privileged to be involved in all of it through the playing along, the voicing of characters and simply the watching over of her proceedings. She could decide to play with any of her toys, small or great, in single or in combination, and could spend hours at it, or involve herself for a short while, then suddenly feel it's time to go to the park or do something else.
That something else, if not going to the park, is most often watching Playhouse Disney--the one channel out of the more than 100 that are subscribed to here--that I allow her and myself to watch. When not that, we watch Care Bears and other movies on the computer, or, lately, we've been delving into the early days of Disney cartoons via online video sources. She's taken quite a liking to the old Silly Symphonies Disney used to put out. They tell quite various tales with often fairly instructive morals, including those of the Pied Piper, Father Noah and the Ark, and King Midas. After seeing the Golden Touch of Midas--and seeing it again, and then again I don't know how many times--she took to flitting about, imparting the Golden Touch. I became a golden statue many times, and our food, her toys and anything else within reach of her imagination turned to gold for a while in its turn. "I've got the golden touch!", she had me to know. Then I told her that no, I had the golden touch, and she restated her claim to it. We ended up trying to out-touch each other and simultaneously avoid becoming the statue-victim.
She has all the makings of a Silly Symphony herself, I think.
| posted by John at 8:24 PM
