Mothers And Daughters

LIUYI, China — Bathed in a faint afternoon sunlight that seems to highlight every wrinkle on her face and hands, Fu Huiying hobbles around her dusty home. Nearby, chopped vegetables suggest a dinner half-made, and the smoke of years of cooking has stained the wall behind a small gas stove. But the eyes are drawn to Fu's deformed feet and the tiny, ornate shoes on the floor next to her, both objects marking the 76-year-old as one of the last of a kind. For almost a millennium, the practice of foot binding was prevalent across Chinese society, starting with the wealthier classes but over the years spreading down through urban and then poorer rural communities.

YREKA, Calif. - Deep in Siskiyou County in far Northern California, high granite peaks and rocky streams have long incited gold miners, including my grandfather, who in the 1930s lived with his family - my grandmother, mother and aunt - in a two-room cabin near the Dewey gold mine southwest of Yreka. My mother, who doesn't remember much about the area because she was 3 when they left, and I recently headed to this beautiful backwater to find out what we could about the gold mine where my grandfather worked and to bask in the region's simple charms.

With the door shut gently but firmly and the blinds drawn against hectic Ventura Boulevard, the women were left with few distractions. Only an oversize jar of low-fat pretzels and cups of purified water offered something to gnaw on and swallow besides their own grief. "She dropped me off and that was about it," Rona began, describing her sense of neglect during recent surgery. "And then she said some unkind things to me and then never called me."

A decades-spanning musical drama about a mother and daughter, "Beloved" is both broody and bright, steeped in amour in all its Gallic permutations - mad, destined, unrequited, sustaining. In the central roles, real-life mother and daughter Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni bring a chemical spark to the onscreen dynamics, and their compelling performances anchor the story's novelistic sprawl, especially when it falters or loses focus. Moving from frothy '60s nostalgia to dark melodrama, director Christophe Honoré's film follows characters who follow their hearts, unwilling to accept such potential barriers to desire as marital status, language and sexual orientation.

Forget shopping. Movies have become the ultimate bonding ritual for moms and daughters. There's something freeing about sharing laughter, tears and, yes, heartthrobs. It's as if the parental curtain comes down and mom and daughter become gal pals. The trick is in choosing what to see. New York-based humorist Rosemary Rogers (wife of cult director Robert Downey Sr.) and her daughter Nell Rogers Michlin have been watching movies together for 20 years.

These sick, undetected, life-destroying beings need to be exposed for all the world to see. I applaud these brave sisters, mothers and daughters for their courage and their strength of heart. I hope they can finally regain the guilt-free lives they deserve. As for Raymond Lewis, he lived like an oversexed dog--too bad he can't be castrated like one. REGINA NORMAN Sherman Oaks

Mothers and daughters will be honored for community service and women's rights work at a Mother's Day Brunch celebrating more than a decade of service at the Westside Women's Clinic in Santa Monica. The May 11 event will be at the Brentwood home of Pamela and Arthur Leeds. The winners include actress and hunger activist Mary Ann Mobley, women's rights advocate Billie Heller, USC basketball star Cheryl Miller, television series host Yolanda Nava and Los Angeles city official Rose Ochi.

Chimpanzees can match mothers to sons purely on the basis of familial resemblance. Yet, surprisingly, the chimps perceived no more resemblance between mothers and daughters than between unrelated individuals, researchers reported today in Nature. The Atlanta researchers tested the chimps' ability to recognize black and white photos of such family pairings. They concluded that this skill might help in chimpanzee society, in which males ally and undertake great risks for one another.

South Coast Repertory turned its spotlight on prominent women of Orange County at a party following Sunday's performance of "If We Are Women," a play about mothers and daughters written and performed by women. Women on SCR's board of trustees invited about 100 of the county's female movers and shakers to bring their mothers or daughters to see the show and afterward enjoy hors d'oeuvres, desserts and wines in the lobby of the Costa Mesa theater.

THREE WOMEN by Marie Hanson (Canterbury: $7.95, paperback). There is a haunting quality to Marie Hanson's "Three Women" that is reminiscent of the novels of Jean Rhys. The similarity lies in the extraordinarily truthful tone, the fact that they both have written about women with desperate, marginal lives, and the lack of sentimentality with which they approach the subject. Hanson's novel is divided into three sections, each of which takes a character's name and tells her story.

LIUYI, China — Bathed in a faint afternoon sunlight that seems to highlight every wrinkle on her face and hands, Fu Huiying hobbles around her dusty home. Nearby, chopped vegetables suggest a dinner half-made, and the smoke of years of cooking has stained the wall behind a small gas stove. But the eyes are drawn to Fu's deformed feet and the tiny, ornate shoes on the floor next to her, both objects marking the 76-year-old as one of the last of a kind. For almost a millennium, the practice of foot binding was prevalent across Chinese society, starting with the wealthier classes but over the years spreading down through urban and then poorer rural communities.

One bright, rainy September, my mother and I walked from Edinburgh to Dundee. Every day we trekked about six to 11 miles, along a skull-gray coast, on ancient tracks and lanes recently united under the banner of the Fife Coastal Path. A work in progress, the path sometimes petered out into a cow field or a tumble-down castle on a bluff above the North Sea. Though my mother was approaching 70 and I was close to 50, our relationship is a work in progress, full of twists and hairpin turns.

  The elderly Italian woman will know more. Her name is Maria, or Um Dani, the mother of Daniel. She lives beyond the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, past the Gurgi Mosque, the one with the blue and gold tiles around the marble doorway. Then down an unpaved path, over by the 17th century Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where she is a parishioner, somewhere in that jumble of alleyways. She has lived there forever. The kids playing ball in the street will know exactly where. Her friend died 10, 15 years ago. And so she's perhaps the only Italian left from that era, from before Moammar Kadafi and his men took power four decades ago and hurried the Europeans out of the country, seizing their homes and property.

Sada Thompson, a Tony Award-winning actress best known to TV viewers for her Emmy Award-winning role as the matriarch in the 1970s dramatic TV series "Family," has died. She was 83. Thompson, a resident of Southbury, Conn., died of lung disease Wednesday at Danbury Hospital, said her son-in-law, Tony Sgueglia. Once described by New York Times theater critic Walter Kerr as "one of the American theater's finest actresses," Thompson won a Tony for best actress in a play in 1972 for George Furth's comedy "Twigs," in which she played four different roles — a mother and her three daughters — in four linked sketches.

Patrick Nyaleta was a cow herder by the time he was 6. Like many rural Kenyans, his father measured his wealth in cattle and needed his children to tend them. One day, Patrick threw a rock at a wayward cow, killing it — the Kenyan equivalent of wrecking your father's roadster. His father beat the 8-year-old boy, yelling, "You will never again touch my cows!" Patrick was packed off to school in disgrace. "I was a skinny boy with no shoes, and I couldn't read or write," says Patrick, who now speaks German, Italian, English, Kiswahili and several tribal languages.

From the house we built With blood and soil To the road on which The moonlight procession Flies forth on their boat Of shooting stars It is a pity you did not wish To stay here with us The poet had crafted those words so long ago. Flush from the victory of a People's Revolution in Iran that ousted a repressive monarch for a bearded cleric who spouted promises of freedom and quality, Partow Nooriala all too soon came to believe that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had deceived them.

With the door shut gently but firmly and the blinds drawn against hectic traffic, the mothers were left with few distractions. Low-fat pretzels and purified water were the only things to gnaw on and swallow besides their grief about their daughters. "She dropped me off and that was about it," Rona began, describing her sense of neglect during recent surgery. "And then she said some unkind things to me and then never called me."

For as long as there have been mothers and daughters, there have been battles over clothes. Valencia real estate assistant Rose Marie Rockel, 39, says she sometimes goes ballistic over what 15-year-old Jaime wears. Jaime, who will be a junior at Hart High School in Newhall, says her look is a form of self-expression. This is how they see it, as told to free-lance writer Andrea Heiman. "I wear whatever I want, but no matter what, she doesn't like it. She hates my Docs (the boot variety).

As a rule, the fashion industry targets the young and hip. And as women move into their 40s -- and out of fashion marketers' viewfinders -- navigating where to shop (Chico's?) and what to buy (embroidered vests?) gets trickier.

I promised I'd never again succumb to puppy love after my little Puff died last summer. So why did I spend the last month stepping over chew toys, shivering through midnight backyard bathroom runs and patrolling the house with a roll of paper towels and bottle of Urine Gone? Because three months without a puppy in our house was long enough. By Thanksgiving, I could feel my daughters' longing build.