Muristek
The Wall Street Journal essay about keeping shoes on left me aghast. As my Auntie Chih-Mei put it: ‘When you walk into my house wearing shoes, you are walking across my heart’
When I was in third grade, I was sent away for a semester to my parents’ native Taiwan, as part of an effort to make me less of a disgrace to my ancestors. The idea was that I, an unruly little snot, would benefit from Chinese language immersion and exposure to the superior self-discipline and obedience of Formosan youth. Three months later, my Mandarin remained middling, and I’d managed to corrupt my class with shared snacks and American comic books.
But I did learn one big lesson, courtesy of my Auntie Chih-Mei, a towering figure who’d quit high school to help raise nine younger brothers and sisters, was pushed to run for the national legislature by her awestruck neighbors (and won, serving effectively for decades), and had zero patience for nonsense from unruly little snots. On my first day at her house, I’d stepped across the threshold still wearing my sneakers, and been instantly speared with an icy rebuke: “When you walk into my house wearing shoes,” she said, “you are walking across my heart.”
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