Playdoh
A heat wave has set in this week again, all up and down the California coast. Here in town we have temperatures ranging a full 30 degrees – 90°F in the early afternoon, back down to 58°F in the early morning. There's not a cloud in the sky, and shade is difficult to find in our development. I've had to find more activities to do at home with the kids, to help break up the day a bit.
One toy that has really stuck and worked well for both the 1-year-old and 3-year-old is Playdoh. I have a hand-me-down set of a variety of colors, as well as a newly acquired tool set. The kids are more captivated by the tools than anything, which are constructed of sturdy plastic and can be banged against windows and walls, and used as containers in the bathtub. They can't open the containers themselves, and come to me with the little tubs. Some have dried, some are caked in a thick layer of white mold. It is flour, after all. I toss the whole tub, and shudder at the rare moments when baby sees some colorful dough still stuck on the tips of his nails, and sucks on it.
The dough is hard to scrape out correctly of the tubs. It's moistened with some kind of mineral oil, most likely a petroleum byproduct. Little droplets stick to the side, and eventually cake on. The kids mix the colors all the time. I'm only bothered when the mixture is not aesthetic, and find myself tediously massaging it back into one homogeneous mass.
Often I am cooking while they are playing. I bring out the bag and they giggle with delight, running after me to have first pick of their favorite tools. There is only one pair of scissors, whereas there are many rollers, knives, rolling cutters and decorative molds. They fight over the one pair in cascading screeches. In turns they bring me tubs to open for them. I grumble, and rinse the raw chicken off my hands, open the tubs, tediously scrape out the dough and form it into some semblance of a sphere, rinse my hands again and attempt to scrape off the dough from under my fingernails before I return to cooking.
Lately I have been trying to set aside time to actually play more with Playdoh. It is meditative, the scraping and molding and cutting. I roll perfect spheres and flatten them into a long rope, and cut off little pieces one by one with the knife, the way my dad begins when he makes dumplings. Baby babbles with delight as he takes them nimbly in between his pointer and thumb, sorting by color into their respective tubs. I think about making noodles with my paternal grandparents out in their village, when I used to visit during the holidays. I was 4 or 5; they let me help with the scraping and the turning of the crank on the noodle machine. Back then I lived with my maternal grandparents for most of the year, in the capital. Compared to them, my rural grandparents and other aunts and uncles were more laid back, ready to get messy and play, to make a ruckus and shout over our din, to get competitive over card games. My older boy cousins and I scrambled in and out of the house constantly without supervision, especially during the summers. We peeled pomegranates that came from the tree in the front courtyard, our faces caked in the crimson extract. To ring in the New Year we set off fire crackers and ran down the snowy dirt paths, screaming.
When I left China, my play became largely solitary. I rollerbladed at the park, alone. I made paper crafts in my room, alone. Did jigsaw puzzles, drew pictures, read books, practiced Chinese calligraphy. Adults supervised, but rarely if ever got their hands dirty. I had trouble finding friends who stayed in my life for more than several months at a time – they moved, or I moved, or I wasn't outgoing enough to qualify to hang out with a group. On weekends my parents regularly took me to the bookstore, and we watched movies and documentaries in our living room, in silence.
My dad took me to the Y, where he taught me how to swim. Those afternoons, I cherished, along with his stories of forbidden swimming in the water reservoir in his youth, all the times he nearly drowned and how he learned to stay afloat on his own. Sometimes my mom came along and watched us from the other side of the glass.
I was born during the One Child Policy. My parents were in grad school in the US, first one then the other, while I had to stay behind because my visa was denied due to my dad's insufficient income as a grad student on scholarship, piecing together part-time jobs under the table. They were abroad from before I turned 3, till when I was almost 7, when I immigrated myself and joined them in Los Angeles.
Their parenting journey is so different from mine, and my mom in recent years has pivoted a lot from her old perspective, and yet it's impossible not to revisit my childhood and how it might have been shaped by these events. Whether it was intentional or not, I largely grew up around adults who had long abandoned play.
These days, I am trying my utmost to fight against this conditioning. This blog is perhaps an example of this, a chance to play with words, and stories.