A Daughter Remembers

The origin of 两片灵芝:

In 1998, Marjorie suddenly sent me a package. She explained that after Grace had died, the house at Glen Cove had not been occupied, but now that it was to be sold, she and her daughter Lisa had gone to the cellar to clean up whatever old junk there was before the house was taken over by the new owner. Among great piles of litter, she found two pieces of lingzhi, with Chinese characters inscribed on them. Since she did not read Chinese, she thought I might be interested, so she mailed them to me.

Each of those two pieces of lingzhi was about the size of a small book. There were tiny words etched on the surface of each fungus. Upon close inspection, on the corner of one of them, were the words “Haines Fall, Catskill, N.Y. Sept. 9, 1923.” Just one glance, and I recognized my father’s handwriting.

Below those brief words in English were lines and lines of Chinese, also in my father’s handwriting. I smiled when I saw them. It was probably on one of his hiking trips to the Mountains that he had found the lingzhi, pried them off the trees and then carefully etched in the words, thinking what a clever and charming idea it would be to bring them home as a souvenir.

That was what I thought at first, but after I examined it again, I recognized it was a copy of Li Ling’s1 letter titled “An Answer to Su Wu.”

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