My Mother’s Park Bench – Spiritual Media Blog

His mother’s memoir, by Richard P. Husun, editor of Spring Flowers

I was in Boston on Christmas Day 2018, feeling purposeless and depressed, and wanted to leave it alone. It was out of season and warm that day so I decided to run. In a few minutes, I was across a busy straw drive on the footbridge behind Boston University campus. I turned to the overly familiar pedestrian path that bends along the Charles River, and suddenly the traffic noise began to quiet. My mother, who had passed away four years ago, ran regularly along this route, albeit in the opposite direction. She has lived here since 1980 when she and I moved from mainland China to the United States. At the time, my mother and I ran together from our home in Beacon Hill to the same BU Footbridge.

I left Boston in the mid-1980s and went to college. Every time I visited my mother, I either took long walks along this same path or took long walks. By the end of her life she was suffering from clinical depression and Alzheimer’s disease, but we walked as long as she could. And we sat under benches in every park along the way, especially the deciduous trees in the shade. Sometimes I watched the sun set behind the vintage sit Gopetroleum Corporation sign before returning to Beacon Hill.

I continued running when Hatchshell, the Charles River Esplanade’s outdoor concert venue, came into view. It was over 50 degrees Fahrenheit and swelled at me. In the early 2000s, the road was extended to North Station and then to Charlestown as the city revamped the Boston Garden area and opened a Big Dig. After bent around the hatch shell, I handed over an Asian woman who was taking pictures with my iPhone. I stopped to connect the shoe store and she walked past me, heading towards the park bench by the river just before Longfellow Bridge. It wasn’t just a park bench. It was what my mother and I sat most. I sat there hundreds of times at least in the 1980s. We called it “our bench.” It was 15 feet from the water and about 50 feet from the jetty at Longfellow Bridge.

She was born and raised in China, but my mother grew up speaking English and was adopted by an American medical missionary at the age of one. She attended a Chinese English-speaking school and lived in the United States for three years during World War II. In contrast, when I arrived here at age 14, I knew little English. And I was attending the prestigious Milton Academy when I barely spoke and read English. After we settled in Boston, my mother worked hard to help me learn proper English. She spent the evenings and weekends translating my school assignments, including textbooks. Animal Farm, 1984, The story of two cities, Great Gatsbyand Huckleberry Fin. She scrawled kanji between lines to help her recognize the meaning of English words. On a Sunday afternoon we packed lunch. After the church we sat along Charles on our “bench.” There, he coached me until the sun set behind the landmark of Sitgo. She desperately wanted me to succeed in a language that she had been forced to stop speaking for decades while trapped in Mao Zedong’s China. I was a continuation of her dreams.

As you approach Longfellow Bridge, your running path converges with the bench. A red line train rumbled upward as an Asian woman began waving at me to take a photo. I nodded, she pointed to the river and bridge and handed me her phone. I looked at the bridge and river background and suggested what I thought was the perfect place for her to stand. However, she didn’t understand what I said and continued walking until she was standing right next to our bench. To her surprise, she sat on the bench and turned towards the river. Taking a photo of her makes the river and bridge in the background almost impossible.

I gestured desperately to make her stand up and turn around. But she didn’t move. She just sat there looking straight into the river. Another train was passing by, and I cried. Going towards Me so I can get your face in the photos. “But still, she didn’t respond.

So I took a picture of her left profile and tried to get a bridge and river in the background. As she lowered her body to the same level as her face, she shook her hair with a comb behind her left ear and stared in the direction of the Citigo sign. Her eyes glowed as the clear view on the left side of her face and I saw my mother sitting on our park bench.

After handing over her iPhone, I jogged and tears flowed down my face. I had been working for the past four years to complete my mother’s memoirs, but I had all crashed to stop the previous summer. I was at a loss and couldn’t write a word for a few months. To complete my mother’s book, I had to write her unfinished chapters, especially those that took place in my childhood, which had wreaked havoc for everyone, including our family. I realized I was reliving the same painful story my mother had. The stress of writing about the fears of that era, as she experienced in the last years of her life, has now led to my own depression. I was mad at my mother for asking me to complete the book, but four years after her passing, I boldly found myself completing her own awful book. When not cursed, I begged her to stop destroying my life with my imagination.

Then, on a warm day in December 2018, she sat on our park bench, informing me that she was with me the whole time, as if she had heard me.

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Richard Perkins Husun Born in China in 1966, he was one of the first teenagers to legally leave China after the Mao Cultural Revolution. He received his PhD. He left chemistry at the University of Chicago, became a professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and the University of Wisconsin Madison University, before retiring in 2022. Spring flowers (Arnshaw’s book) His mother, Jean Tren Hawa Perkins, Maryland. The three-volume memoir documented her life as an American medical missionary, a survivor of China’s brutal communist regime, an ophthalmologist, an immigrant and a mother. Hsung lives in Madison with his wife. There, preventing squirrels from digging up his backyard has become a daily scientific obsession. See more details at richardperkinshsung.com.