Frog, qingwa (sounds like: ching-wa)
For some time, “Chinese” and “frog” have brought to mind the little red cooler that lives in the trunk of our friend John’s car, for the express purpose of ferrying home frogs’ legs, should he happen to find himself in a Chinatown.
Now, I think instead (or maybe too) of the leggy frog in striped blue tights that hung from Emmy’s Gymini. An early gift — quickly nicknamed The Crazy Mat — it was a soft square snapped to the ends of two crossed arcs from which a handful of characters hung down. The idea, and the reality, being that the baby would lie on her back and look up at these, entertained entranced. Rich and I, both freelancers working from home, managed to go back to work when Emmy was four weeks old, thanks in large part to all the hanging out she did with her “friends” — a sunshine that played music when swatted aggressively, a lame turtle, some leaves and that dandy of a frog, the ching-wa.
We did a lot of talking and singing via the ching-wa, who had a mechanism in his torso that enabled him to wriggle up after being pulled down.
These days, barnyards now abound in our house. As though we’re preparing our child for a life of hard agriculture, her books, puzzles, songs, videos and even outfits feature cows, pigs, chickens, geese, farmers. It definitely wasn’t planned. For some reason, Rich hasn’t translated any of these others for me. Maybe he doesn’t know the words, and I haven’t asked. But since that ching-wa in the tights, I’ve started noticing the frogs on the periphery.
There’s a ching-wa family that splashes with a pig and sheep in a piece-of-crap electronic book my mother bought at a yard sale (all the buttons now emit sounds of static, but I admit I’m taken with the story); the ching-wa in “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”; the ching-wa in Xavier Deneux’s “My Animals”; and, most recently, a ching-wa in the collection of finger puppets a friend brought back from her home country of Bangladesh. Maybe kids there are subjected to fewer sheep and pigs, as this one keeps company with a lion, an elephant, a rabbit and a duck.
Unlike that first ching-wa, this guy (alas, like so many Chinatown frogs, one imagines) has little more than his smile.
