Offer A Sacrifice To Bamboo

On the driveway side of my LA house, there are five windows. From inside looking out, every window greeted the eye with green and luxuriant bamboo. The scene looked just like the paintings. The bamboo grew along the further side of my driveway and all way to the gate. I always associated the scene with the Long Corridor of the Summer Palace in Beijing. In one section of the corridor, there are many windows with a variety of shapes: square, circular, rectangle, and triangular. Some of the windows had unusual shapes, they looked like a gourd, a peach or a flower. Through these windows when I looked out, I always saw the flowers, pine trees, bamboos, lakes even mountains. Those windows were just like painting frames, they framed the scenes. The compositions looked like traditional Chinese landscape or flower paintings. These Chinese garden designs were really ingenious creations. They could change the ordinary to the extraordinary. These designs often used windows and tortuous structures to divided small spaces to look grand and far-reaching, that made people feel pleasantly surprised and provided endless savor. Even though my windows are only contemporary style and rectangular shape with eight panels, they brought in the beauty of the scenery and always made enjoyment for me.

I didn’t plant these bamboos. When my husband, Bill, bought this house in 1986, there already was a small clump of bamboos. Through almost twenty years, they grew more and more, higher and higher. Though they only had 3-4 feet wide space, they extended to the side and gradually stretched to 50 feet long and 20 feet high. They had become a crowded, narrow bamboo wall.

Bill, having grown up as a Marine, has his style. He prefers a strait forward approach and fight a quick battle to force a quick decision. After he bought this house, he made a clean sweep of the weeds and trees. The bamboo was always a thorn in his side. After I moved in, I repeatedly urged the bamboo to stay. Fortunately the bamboo was survivor.

When I first saw the bamboo, they immediately touched my heart and aroused my homesickness. Bamboo is not grown only in China, however in Chinese life they are omnipresent. In my memory, bamboos were full in my life. Since I was a toddler, I used a child walker, a stroller and play toys: kit and pinwheel all made by bamboo. In my house, we used bamboo made tables, chairs, beds, pillows, mates and fans. In the kitchen, we used a bamboo steamer. On the dinning table we used bamboo chopstick and the bamboo shoots were always a delicious dish. On the street, there were houses made by bamboo, for high-rise buildings, there were bamboo sticks as the scaffolds. When I went to the countryside for the re-education, I carried water buckets, basket and carry pole, also made by bamboo. The Chinese musical instruments as flute, Erhu, Zheng and Pipa had very unique tones because they were made by bamboo. In my art studio, my painting brush’s handles, brush holder, and ruler were made by bamboo too… too numerous to mention. Probably in the world, none of the people had such closest relationship with bamboo as the Chinese.

Bamboo is a wild plant. It prefers the warmer climates and especially likes to grow in central and southern China. Although there are many kinds of bamboos, from small, elegant to huge, grand, however they all have the same character, they grow fast, straight and hollow body with a very hard quality. For a thousand years, bamboo has an indissoluble band with Chinese life.

In additional to practical value, bamboo has a graceful beauty. From a distance the bamboo woods are lush luxuriance. When one goes inside of the bamboo clump, the sound whistling of wind and pattering of bamboo leafs make people feel cool, refreshed and joyous. As time passes, Chinese scholars had show a favoritism to bamboo and made it a distillation of spiritual level. Bamboo has been personified. For instance, the hard quality and straight shape of bamboo stick symbolized human character of honesty and frankness ; the bamboo joints stand for the moral quality and integrity; the hollow body of bamboo signified a great and humble heart.

Chinese literature and art have continuously painted, praised, and cherished the bamboo for more than a thousand years. From Yuan Dynasty a master scholar Zhao Meng Hu combined Chinese calligraphy technique to paint bamboo to Qing Dynasty the famous monk artists Shi Tao and Ba Dai’s splash-ink bamboo paintings, they repeatedly used bamboo as the subject to develop Chinese art theories and esthetic points. Bamboo had become one of the spiritual symbols of Chinese literati—Four Gentlemen (the four gentlemen are: Plum Blossom, Orchid, Bamboo and Chrysanthemum).

No wonder I had such a sentimental relationship with Bamboo.

I don’t know the name of my bamboo. They were medium sizes and the ordinary type. Though I knew the bamboo roots grew in a horizontal way, but I don’t know my bamboo roots were jumping. Every spring season, the new bamboo shoots could jump out of the ground five feet away from the old root. At the ends of the bamboo wood, I planted two pine trees and put a few big rocks to give them a limitation to grow. A few years later, the young bamboo already squeezed the pine trees underneath, then crossed under the rocks and leaped up from the ground five feet away.

Behind the bamboo wood is my neighbor Larry’s fence. He set two metal sheets into the ground for two feet to stop my bamboo from growing over. But once in a while, his wife Cathy complained, the bamboo even came out of the ground at the further side of their yard. In front of bamboo is my driveway, then there is another 3-4 feet of soil, my house site behind it. Gradually the stubborn bamboo unexpectedly grew under my 10 feet of concrete driveway and shot out of the ground. Bill hated them: “The best way to kill them is to pour gasoline on them.”

I always ignored those complaints. To take care of bamboo had become my big routine labor work. Especially in the spring, almost every day, I have to checked on them and pull out the bamboo shoots that grew in the areas I didn’t want. Some of the tender, young shoots became a dish in our dinners. If I was careless for one or two days, the bamboo shoots would grow tall and shoot out among other plants. The only way I could control them was to cut them off. Year to year, I treated them like when the head aches, treat the head, when the foot hurts, treat the foot. A single bamboo only lives 4-5 years. As time passes my bamboo grew only in this small area and was getting unhealthy: Some of these shoots only grew half way then became soft and dead. Some of the bamboo had crowed leafs, that seemed congenitally deficient. My bamboo was getting too crowded, I often have to go into the back of the bamboo wood to pull out the dead and collected the dry leafs. The only explanation of my obstinacy is my deep culture roots that drive me to sacrifice for it.

But this spring, the situation had to be squarely faced. In May, Bill and I traveled to Europe for a month. The night we came back home, the first thing for me was to check out my bamboo. I went outside and was shocked, the new bamboo came out of the flowers and shrubs and grew all over another side of the driveway, some of the bamboos already were15 feet high. I forgot my fatigue, and that same night, cut them off. A few weeks later, I was planting some new flowers under my windows. When I started to dig the ground, it was so hard to working on. Soon I discovered the whole underground was spread with the bamboo roots. They were crisscross and layer upon layer. Bamboo already took over my whole ground. Before I appreciated my professor LI Ku Chan’s poem about bamboo roots: “before come out of the ground, they already have joints.” But now, I only felt frightened. The scene reminded me of a story that my neighbor Elry told me. A friend of him planted bamboos all over his yard. The result was the bamboos grew into his house and through the sewer pipe came out of the toilet. I thought it was a joke, but now I believe it.

What was I going to do? For a long time I maintained a spirit to defend the bamboo. Now it was broken by bamboo it selves. Before I had a relationship with bamboo, I was mentally and visually touched. At the practical way, I only used bamboo made products. Now I was facing the real bamboo from the ground and related with my living environment. Then everything had became reality. To avoid future trouble, my only choice was to cut the whole bamboo wood out. Bill happily reacted; “you finally understand it, you should do this a long time ago.” Larry and Cathy would clap and cheer.

A few Mexican gardeners worked only one day and the whole bamboo was gone. When the bottom of the bamboo showed up, I was surprised to see them so crammed together. Some of the bamboos even grew on top of others. The whole area was like a solid rock. Following the boom, boom sounds of the router machine, the bamboo became the powder and the dust spread in the air. I suddenly felt the powder had a spirit like human ashes. They flowed with the wind and following the nature cycles, may come back someday and somewhere.

I looked out my windows again. The bald fence and neighbor’s plain wall offended my eyes. The tremendous changes of the landscape even irritated my Chow dog, Mao Mao. That same night, he was up and down on the stairway, running around in the house and whining the whole night.

With the disconsolate mood, a Chinese idiom came out of my mind: “with the skin gone, what can the hair adhere to.” I live in the 21st century in America. How could I still hold on to the value of the ancient Chinese literati? I may be deluding myself.

Rulan Geiger

September 27,2005