The Year of the Rat

By Josephine Ensign, Seattle, U.S.

What would it be like to have enough? To be enough?

These questions ricochet inside me as I go about my days, now altered and contracted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Riding the urge waves of hoarding. Toilet paper. Dried beans. Rice. Goat cheese. Soy milk. Fresh vegetables. Medications. Moments alone yet not lonely.

I think of my mother, deceased now for twelve years. I am glad she is not living still, to be in the path of the relentless virus decimating the elderly. But I think of her, child of the Great Depression, sustained through lean years by stale, government-issued dried cow's milk she described as rancid. She told me that her mother forced her and her younger sister to drink at least two glasses of this milk each day, along with cod-liver oil to ward off rickets.

My mother was not a hoarder, but she abhorred waste of any kind. Food. Especially vegetables and fruit she and my father grew in a large garden and which she canned or froze to use year-round. Scraps of cotton calico fabric from clothes she sewed and which she turned into quilts for our beds. Different versions of her paintings and etchings she made in her art studio. Talent. Opportunity. Her own. Mine.

I was born in the Year of the Rat in 1960, the year that millions of Chinese people starved to death in a mass famine that the rest of the word did not know about until much later. I did not know about it until this year–another Year of the Rat–my 60th year, and the completion of a life cycle in Eastern tradition.

From an early age, I was drawn to nature, biology, and science. At age eight, walking barefoot down the red-dirt road to my home, I decided I would become a scientist, that I would discover a new strain of rice that would keep people worldwide from dying of hunger. Instead, I became a nurse and worked to provide health care to immigrants and homeless people.

Hunger. Widespread and deepening hunger is back in our world now as a side effect of the pandemic. Hunger is here in Seattle where I live. Neighborhood Little Free Libraries are being turned into Little Free Pantries to help feed people in need. Tins of tuna fish. Jars of peanut butter. Bags of rice. And books. They give me hope.