Auld Lang Syne: a salute to old friends

New Year's Eve greetings from Great Barrington

I have a new oldest friend. We were 7 years old and in the same 2nd grade class in Bloomington, Minnesota. We never played together (after all, he was a boy!) and we didn’t live in the same neighborhood so we never saw each other outside of the classroom. But I’ve always thought of him when people ask how I got interested in China.

I wasn’t interested in China first, but in Japan. And that little boy is part of the story because he was half-Japanese. This enchanted me because he was the only child I knew who was not a white Protestant. Even Catholics were rare and rather suspect (of course my best friend in 5th grade was Catholic).

Last week I was thinking of this “white bread” childhood and how much I’d longed to escape it. I decided to look up that little boy, whose name I remembered clearly. Because I put “Japan” in the search, I found his email more easily than almost anyone I’ve ever searched for - maybe 20 minutes in total.

We’ve had a lovely exchange of emails now. I explained how he, along with Mrs Tanaka, the wife of a man my father worked with, had spurred that early interest in Japan.

He was only at my school for that single year, but to my surprise he remembered me as a fair-haired girl taller than he who was also a great reader. (Is it a coincidence that he too ended up in publishing?)

My parents played bridge with Mr and Mrs Tanaka, and when she saw my absorption in the pair of Time-Life books about Japan that had somehow ended up in our house, Mrs Tanaka brought me Japanese dolls after her next trip home. She made me a kimono, too, and explained that to wash it properly one should take it completely apart and then stitch it back together. (Or so I remember - could this possibly be true?) I gave away the kimono and dolls, but I still have a music box, which my father bought in Tokyo on leave during the Korean War. It was a basic tourist gift but I was fascinated by the landscape, and the lacquer.

It would have been about that time that we learned a popular American children’s song called “Make New Friends”:

Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver, the other is gold.
A circle is round, it has no end.
That's how long, I will be your friend. Read all the lyrics here

The Scottish, too, remind us to think of old friends. They celebrate the New Year like no one else (I was lucky enough to see this for myself 5 years ago, dancing in a castle), and it’s Robert Burns’s lines we sing:

Should Old Acquaintance be forgot,
and never thought upon;
The flames of Love extinguished,
and fully past and gone:
Is thy sweet Heart now grown so cold,
that loving Breast of thine;
That thou canst never once reflect
On old long syne. 

Soon after I started working with Chinese scholars and editors, I learned how important “old friends” are in China. Over time, I would occasionally be referred to as lao pengyou 老朋友. It warmed my heart.

How universal this is, our need for enduring friendships!

Looking for Japan photos, I found this from 2014. You can imagine how thrilled I was to see so many women in kimono.

On this New Year’s Eve, I wish I could reach out to every person who reads this wee note - old friends and new, people I’ve met and many I haven’t, scattered around the globe - with a hand of friendship and fellowship. We’re in it together. Happy New Year!

Yours ever, Karen.

PS: What could be more appropriate today than to celebrate one dear friend, Joan Lebold Cohen, who turned ninety his year. Here’s a photo of us (in our Chinese and Japanese jackets) taken at the Japanese consulate in New York a decade ago. She’s brought joy to me and to many, many others.