Rooftops and Rice
As I am sure it has been for so many other people, when my parents came for dinner, as they do so often, the disasterous hurricaine bearing down on New Orleans was a topic of worried conversation.
My father remembered growing up, their family trying to reenforce the little house they lived in, boarding up windows as best as they could, trying to tie down and anchor the tin roof so it wouldn't blow away. Sometimes it would work. Sometimes it wouldn't. In the worst storms, it wouldn't, and the roof, after hours of roaring rattling would finally tear off and blow away and they would brace for literal dear life under a heavy table as the sky exploded above them. Tornados like we got in the Midwest, my father reflected, at least were over with quickly. The typhoons that wracked Taiwan when he was growing up would last for hours and hours and hours, like hanging on inside of a giant wet vacumn cleaner. In an age before weather satelites, in a nation too poor for radios, there was no way to know much of anything, and nothing to do but to hold on and hang on.
My mother recalled waiting for days for the water after the typhoon to recede; Taipei was at least luckier than New Orleans in that Taipei was above sea level, and given enough time, the floodwaters would eventually drop by themselves. But until then, you just had families huddling on rooftop like literal islands in six, eight, ten feet deep seas of mud and s**t, no shelter from the tropical sun, no escape, no food. For Taiwan in those days was a third-world nation, and there were no helicopters, no boats, no Red Cross or National Guard to come help or relieve, nowhere for help to come from, and nowhere to go.
My mother's family was a lot luckier than most -- their home was actually two stories, so they actually had a roof they could wait under, while their neighbors endured on naked rooftops. And even more importantly, their downstairs first-floor neighbors were actually rice merchants, who would move their stocks upstairs to be preserved against the rooftop-high floods. And so my mother's family would cook and cook and cook rice, and then my grandfather and my eldest uncle would swim to the neighboring rooftops with long ropes or clotheslines, and then my mother's family could send bundles of rice across in little baskets so that their neighbors could have food to eat while waiting for the flood waters to recede.
In more than thirty years since they came to build new lives in the Midwest, they've had to deal with all the annoyances of the weather that is a common source of gripe. But, as they reflected today, they've always been quietly grateful that, for all it's annoyances, much of the American Midwest is, really, a very quiet place to live. No typhoons, no routine earthquakes, no routine rooftop-leveling floods, no wildfires. And for that quiet, among many things, our family is thankful.
Our concerns and our best wishes, to all those in harms way.