The True Meaning of Marigold

I discovered the definition of marigold in my Funk and Wagnall’s and it looked something like this:

[ˈmerəˌɡōld]

NOUN

1. a plant of the daisy family, typically with yellow, orange, or copper-brown flowers, that is widely cultivated as an ornamental.

2. used in names of other plants with yellow flowers, e.g., corn marigold, marsh marigold.

In Chinese, the following characters 万 寿 菊 , represent the concept of marigold. The pinyin for the word is Wànshòu jú. The meaning of the characters is as follows. Wàn is the Mandarin word for ten thousand. Shòu is the Mandarin word for life and jú is the word for chrysanthemum. The marigold is considered to be a chrysanthemum flower with ten thousand lives. I guess that makes sense if you look at the number of seeds a marigold plant produces in its lifetime. I will elaborate further on the significance of these Chinese interpretations as my story goes along.

As a young boy, growing up on a pig farm, there weren’t a lot of perks in my daily life, or even my seasonal life for that matter. There were always plenty of chores and activities to keep me occupied on the farm. I learned how to drive a truck and a tractor at an early age and I probably delivered my first litter of baby pigs before I even celebrated my thirteenth birthday. I did get to ride the school bus every day and I had the opportunity to play in a minor baseball league in the spring and summer. I also got to play some hockey in the winter. I wasn’t wanting and far, far from being deprived. One of the greatest joys in my young farm-boy life, however, was to accompany my parents / uncles and aunts / grandfather to the city whenever it was time to take a truck-load of market hogs to the Packing Plant in Saskatoon. It was always fun to play highway games for a couple of hours on the way there and back. The packing plant itself was an unusually interesting place, filled with all kinds of animals and with all kinds of people who worked there.

After the pigs were unloaded, we would pull the stock truck into the cleaning station. There, we would dump out the straw and the manure from the box and then wash it completely clean with the high-pressure water sprayer. Because using the sprayer hose was relatively easy, I sometimes got to do that job. After the pigs had been unloaded and the truck was clean, we would change out of our overalls and show-off our city duds. We would then drive into the down-town section of the city. Sometimes we shopped. Sometimes we had to go to a dentist or doctor appointment. Sometimes we visited a friend of the family or some distant relatives. But always, we stopped for a meal at our favourite restaurant on Second Avenue. It was a Chinese Restaurant and it was called “The Marigold”. I was never really sure who owned the restaurant because there were always plenty of new faces there to greet us when we walked in. I loved the greetings as we entered the restaurant. There were many boisterous “Hellos” spoken in both English and Mandarin. The main dining room was decorated with what I believed to be traditional Chinese artifacts such as big red globe lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Each globe had a display of “Fancy Knots” dangling from the opening at the bottom of the globe. There were statues of Confucius and ancient Chinese Emperors. There were always beautiful decorative fans and large intricately painted ceramic urns in corners and beside central pillars. Chinese character writing appeared everywhere. Jade carvings and oriental paintings decorated the walls. And, there was my favourite “Welcome Cat” on the front cashier’s counter, waving his paw like an elaborate slot machine gone berserk. I loved the “Cat”. To me, it was the crowning touch.

I had concluded that a fellow by the name of Eddie Ma (who was a cousin of Bing Lam - owner of “The Golden Dragon” – a higher end establishment in the Chinese section of town), managed The Marigold. Eddie had also owned a restaurant in our home town before he moved to the city so that is probably why we, and other friends of ours, frequented The Marigold whenever we visited the city. The food was always good there. Most of the time we would order chicken noodle soup to start, then breaded veal cutlets, followed by rice pudding and ice cream. Sometimes we would order Chinese food and my favourite server – Eddie’s wife – would always sit beside me and applaud my superior use of chopsticks as I ate my meal. Eddie’s wife’s name was Mary which was the English version of her Chinese name which was . . . Wanshouju or Marigold. Her full name was Zhang Wanshouju which was quite a mouthful for most, if not all, of the English-speakers in Saskatoon. So, Wanshouju adopted the name Mary to help them avoid unnecessary tongue-tiedness. I assume that the restaurant garnered its name from Eddie’s wife and probably not the reverse. In the spring and summer seasons, each table was adorned with a spherical crystal bowl which contained a single yellow marigold blossom. We were completely surrounded by marigolds of all sizes and shapes – animal, vegetable and mineral.

One of my best boyhood friends was a Chinese kid who was the youngest son of another restaurant owner in our town. I spent a lot of time with him whenever I visited my favorite aunt because he lived across the back alley from her house. I would go over to his place once in a while. His house was the most different and unique house I ever visited as a kid. It had an aroma that I had never smelled before and which greeted you with a giant ubiquitous embrace the second you walked in the door. The pots and pans were not kept in cupboards like they were in all of my relative’s homes – they hung from rods and hooks all over the kitchen and Tom’s mom and dad would bang on them with wooden spoons and metal ladles as they cooked and talked to each other. It seemed like they were always yelling at one another, but every conversation ended in cackles and laughter. The language that was used in Tom’s house was like no other language I had ever heard before. It was spoken quickly and voluminously and with a lyrical, sing-song cadence. Tom’s older brother was also in my grade at school so I had lots of company when I visited. Their parents would always ask me to stay for a meal and the food had flavors and tastes that I had never experienced to that point in my life. Naturally, with such a periodic immersion into the micro-culture of this Chinese household and home, I became very good at using chopsticks (I even learned to call them by their Chinese name – kuaizi) and I also excelled quite proficiently at speaking Mandarin through the naming of foods and other things within this totally remarkable house. I could easily greet the family, ask for food to be passed, and finally, say good-bye at the end of my visit, and all in Mandarin.

Because of the time I had spent visiting my Chinese friends in my home-town and because of the opportunities I had to eat Chinese food and speak the Mandarin language, I was quite able to converse with the owners and servers at The Marigold Restaurant whenever we went there for lunch or supper. This, of course, absolutely delighted Eddie and Mary. They were thrilled to have a nine-year old "white kid" come into their restaurant and extend a hearty, “Nihao, zaoshang hao. Jintian tianqi de hao. Ni you meiyou gong pao ji ding? Women xiang yao nage he sijidou. Xie xie ni.” My parents were always bursting with great pride that I was as fluent in Mandarin as I was, and because of that they always let me do the ordering. Zhang Wanshouju and her other female servers and hostesses would always wear bright and colorful qipaos as they worked away in the restaurant. They always looked slim and elegant and made me and my family feel like we were in a far-away land on the other side of the world. So I always felt so very, special when Wanshouju would snuggle up to me in our booth and get excited about how I could be “almost Chinese”. “Wo de xiao bai Zhong guo ren”, she called me. She would come and go throughout the meal and talk in English to my parents but always in Mandarin to me. Sometimes I felt that Marigold was indeed part of our family. Wanshouju was very pretty and charming and I forever had a school-boy crush on her. I always wished she would come home with us. However, leaving her and waiting to see her again with great anticipation was also one of the little pleasures in my life as a ten-year old.

Over the course of the six or seven years that my family and I visited Marigold’s Marigold Restaurant, we got to know her and Eddie and their kids quite well. Somewhere along the line, they retired or moved on to another location or something, and unfortunately, we lost touch. However, I still remember those trips to The Marigold Restaurant as a wonderful and exciting part of my growing up. Now that I am older and somewhat of an amateur gardener, I plant lots of marigold flowers around various parts of our yard. But, no matter how many plants I put along the pathways and borders each spring and no matter how any dictionary defines MARIGOLD, I will forever in my mind imagine the Marigolds of my youth – The Marigold Restaurant and it’s hostess Wanshouju – I will never merely recollect a simple flower, even if it does have ten thousand lives.