女儿的第一件手工钩针品
The little dog learns a new trick
Em picked up crochet and knitting in her teens, when China was in the dawn of an opening era. Living in the age when supply and materials were in great scarcity and large-scaled machine production was still remote, people were subject to hand-make almost everything, from food to clothes, from furniture to toys. But decades later, when machine making trumps in the world, when machine learning is what people are fascinated with, when a robot can do most of jobs, able to even write a poet, we would think that handmaking would retreat and one day go non-existent. Fortunately this is not the case. It still holds its distinctive place in the evolving world.
J was never taught how to do knitting or crochet. When she, in her twenties, asked her mom Em to teach her, Em gave it a shrug, telling her disparagingly that it would be a waste of time to learn. Industrialization saves labor and time and solves every of our need, efficiently. Why bother and revert to time-consuming manual work?
Em was proved wrong this time. J came home this winter and showed her the fad on Tiktok, along with her self-taught skill: crocheting. One night, Em found back her old-style crochet needle, sat by J, and primed for any question. Under the lamplight, J leaned against the bed rail, her nimble fingers crisscrossing the yarns adeptly, her face glowing with confidence and gratification. When a single straight thread turned to be interlocked with beautiful flowery patterns, Em knows that her girl, who did not even know how to sew a button, surpasses her, blossoming into a handy person who has learned a new trick without her presence.
Em concludes that the world is not just progressing linearly forward but sometimes regressing a bit. People are nostalgic, and come back to hold on to things that are dear to their ancestors. Good things are never to be forgotten, Em thought to herself.
In a sense, crochet is like an artwork, an expression of identity. Girls would delight in putting on what they create by their own hands -- a scarf, a bag, a toy or a sweater, to declare to the world that they are what they wear, and that their life could be dyed just as colorful as yarns.