The Gift You Cherish Most

Most of us receive gifts throughout our lives. Think of gifts you’ve given or received at holidays, birthdays, religious milestones, weddings, graduations, baby showers and the like.

Some gifts are so traditional that we register beforehand at stores or online to direct the giver to gifts we want to receive.

Some gifts are planned because as a culture we recognize the recipient will need assistance with the arrival of a new baby or the establishment of a new home.

Some gifts are very costly (like everything at Tiffany’s). Some gifts may convey the status of the giver or ultimately cloak the recipient with status (like designer fashions or imported leather goods).

Some gifts are deliberately funny (like the gifts you might receive at a bachelor’s party) and others are unintentionally funny (like the carved fertility god statue a friend of mine received as a wedding present).

And then there are handmade gifts (knitted sweaters) and homemade gifts (cookies and jams) you may receive from time to time.

But every once in a while, there are gifts outside all these categories. Perhaps that is what makes such gifts stand apart.

One of the most touching gifts I ever received was from a poor and elderly woman in China.

Several years ago my husband and I travelled in China for about a month. We visited four Provinces where we saw fascinating and historic places like the Great Wall, the famous terra cotta warrior statues in Shaanxi and the Yangtze River.

At that time China was struggling to find its way forward.

We met shopkeepers who offered us their Chairman Mao lapel pins because the Chairman and his ideas were “rubbish.”

We met tour guides who wanted to move West to join the fashion industry or who yearned to open pizza shops. Another tour guide perfected his nearly flawless English-language skills by watching reruns of the old Kojak television series.

We met another middle-aged man, accounting book in hand, who told us he was studying western business and asked us to explain the meaning of a phrase in his textbook “jigger the books.”

But despite visits to spectacular sites and incidental encounters, I felt we were missing contact with ordinary people and how they lived.

I asked our guide in Beijing if it would be possible to meet an ordinary citizen in their home. He pulled the car over beside a cluster of small homes on a busy street. He disappeared for a few minutes and then returned to the car.

“I have found you a home to visit right now so please follow me” the guide said.

I hadn’t expected my request to be granted instantly so neither my husband nor I had thought about what we would do when we visited a stranger’s home in China.

Sometimes fate has a way of arriving so abruptly there is no chance to prepare or plan.

We followed our guide to the home of a small woman who had the look of someone’s beloved grandma. She met us at her door and ushered us inside.

Her home consisted of two unpainted rooms: a kitchen-sitting room and an inner room with her sleeping cot.

The furniture was modest: an aluminum kitchen table with chairs, a small refrigerator and sink and a wooden cupboard on which an old radio rested. On top of the radio and the table were pieces of handmade lace.

Above the lace on the radio sat a clear plastic-domed toothpick holder.

Through our guide we told our hostess she had a lovely home and it was an honor to meet her and see how Chinese people lived.

She then reached over to the plastic toothpick holder and carefully placed it in my hands as a gift for coming to see her and visit her home.

Of course we gave the tiny woman some cash to thank her for allowing us to visit, but cash seemed so coarse on such an important occasion. We said our goodbyes and returned to the car.

We have treasured that plastic toothpick holder for years.

There is a famous saying of Confucius that “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” The circumstances of the giver and the giving make a plastic toothpick holder become a gift of enormous value.

Great religions and philosophies have commented on transcendent gifts.

In the Bible there is a story about the rich putting gifts into an offering box. They are followed by a poor widow who puts in two small copper coins. Jesus notes the rich gave out of abundance, but the widow because of her poverty, gave more (Luke 21: 1–4).

Rabbi Silberberg in Chabad.org explains: “Giving is also the ultimate expression of one’s humanness, the ability to transcend one’s own needs and care for another.”

Doyeon Park, Buddhist Chaplain, writes: “Giving is not to separate oneself from others, but rather to realize the oneness of all.”

Sometimes we may take gifts for granted, but if you think about the true value of a gift, context may be what matters most.

© 2022 L.E. Langner. All rights reserved.