Avuncular

This evening I caught one of my cousins, AJC (or CAJ, strictly speaking), on Skype. She visited the US for six months, between September of last year and March of this year, during which time she lived with her husband in Dearborn, a mere half hour from Ann Arbor.

That was an odd time for me. I wasn't used to having extended family nearby. Extended family had always been something, you know, over there. And now I was having lunch on the weekends with extended family, going shopping with extended family, and calling extended family on the phone. (Extended family never really spoke English before, either.)

I have to admit, I liked having my cousins here. Their presence made Taiwan seem more real to me, gave me hope that someday all ties wouldn't be severed. When they finally left, I took the loss harder than I thought I would. I remember meeting them at Starbucks the day before they left. It was a chilly afternoon -- a photo I have shows us all bundled in big colorful jackets. We sipped coffee and spoke sparingly. I was having a hard time thinking of things to say, and when I did say something, I asked about their travel plans, how long the trip would take, what they'd do when they arrived, all the time denying my impulse to frame their visit in a larger context and tell them how much their visit had meant to me. Still, I felt the ground swell beneath my feet. I was being borne away a little farther from my familial home on waves so massive that from the troughs I couldn't see what was behind me or in front of me.

Those feelings seemed to pass last night when I talked with AJC. She's pregnant, eight weeks. Bored too, having been restricted to the upstairs of her family's apartment in downtown Kaohsiung. She asked if she could send me a picture. Of course, I replied. Here it is:


The 1.5 cm object in the middle is going to be a nephew or niece of mine. It's going to be hard to be an uncle to the little tyke from so far away.