Angela, my boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend, is from Taiwan. When we go out to eat with my boyfriend’s family, she chats with his parents, even his grandparents, in Chinese. She is imbued with knowledge of Chinese culture and dining etiquette. She eats tiny portions and correctly refuses gifts the Chinese way before actually accepting them. Sometimes, I worry that my boyfriend’s parents approve of her more than they do me because she is more Chinese. She’s the one that pours tea for everyone else before refilling her own cup and I’m the one that doesn’t even drink tea because hot beverages burn my tongue.
Here’s a secret: If you ever want to eat at a Chinese restaurant, bring a Chinese friend and have them order for you. Make it abundantly clear that your companion is Chinese. If you’re feeling adventurous, have your friend order an item off the menu that’s handwritten and taped to the walls of the restaurant. It’s probably better than anything listed on the English menu. If you go to the right places, they will even serve you free soup – all because your friend is Chinese.
The Chinese came to America for the money, not a new way of life. Even as they start new lives overseas, the Chinese are still trying to occupy an exclusive society instead of assimilating. Chinese communities are most often described as tight-knit communities where the ins and outs, like ordering the right dishes, are unknown to foreigners who don’t speak and don’t understand the language. To the rest of the world, Chinatown must seem like a gathering of souvenir knick knacks and restaurants that serve orange chicken.
I don’t really speak Chinese and that’s the way my mother intends for it to be. When people ask if I speak Chinese, I say, with a grin and a nervous chuckle, “I speak a little.” That might even be a stretch, I can handle just enough Chinese to get around.
I never understood why a divorce or a separation should be so psychologically traumatizing to a child. Whenever people find out that I only live with my mother and that my dad lives out somewhere in Elmhurst, they give me that look of pity and mutter, “Oh, I’m sorry” as if there’s something to be sorry about. Maybe I wasn’t as perceptive a child as my mentally scarred counterparts. When my dad moved out,
My family is pretty normal. I was brought up by my grandparents who overfed me. My mother was getting her second, or third, PhD and my dad travelled a lot. I didn’t see a lot of my parent
For what it’s worth, my family is pretty normal. Granted, I’m not really being clear with what I mean by ‘normal’. I was brought up by my grandparents because my mother was busy getting a PhD and my dad was busy travelling. I don’t remember seeing much of them as a child. Then my grandfather died and my mother decided to move to America.
Why would I want a complete family anyway? There are more than eight million people in the world and I am a collector, gathering pieces from each culture with which to slowly build the mosaic of my cultural understanding
Whenever someone asks me if I speak Chinese, I say, with a nervous grin, “I speak a little.” I’m secretly trying to vindicate my mother’s decisions and how she wears my inability to speak Chinese as a source of pride when most Chinese parents shake their heads in dismay at how little their offspring speak of their native language. I’m always secretly trying to vindicate some aspect of my life to someone, especially the Chinese, because they find something wrong with every aspect of my life that I reveal to them. No, I can’t read or write Chinese. No, I haven’t been back to China since I moved here. No, we don’t really cook at home. No, we’re not really like you. And no, we don’t have a problem.
After a year’s worth of family gatherings, parties and dinner banquets, I’m still where I have always been, on the outside looking in, but I’ve become an expected guest – Allen’s girlfriend.
I’m still not comfortable saying anything to anyone in Chinese, but I’m not as frightened of the occasional conversation with his aunt or uncle or poking fun at the struggles between his younger cousins.
I’m not too broken up about it, though, not having eight million relatives. Sometimes I’m actually relieved. After a year’s worth of family gatherings, parties and dinner banquet, I’m starting to miss a Sunday morning at home, without half a dozen screaming children playing a video game somewhere or the shouts and yells of the adults gambling in the living room. Or, about being that odd half-family when tradition demands that it be a whole. All the roundness that Kingston observes in her life, “the round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated size that fit one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls” (313) are absent from mine, allowing me to fill my life with shapes of my choosing.
Even after a year’s worth of family gatherings and banquet dinners, getting to know almost all of Allen’s relatives by name, I’m still where I have always been, on the outside looking in.
After a year’s worth of family gatherings and banquet dinner, it’s almost as if I’ve been inducted into their family. His dad traded his Honda for a Nissan Pathfinder so there’s room for Angela and I when we go to one of this ubiquitous gatherings.
The piglet lies face down on the oblong serving tray, the crispy skin and meat of its back exposed and sliced into rectangular portions.
The piglet rests on a tall, oblong serving tray that dominates the glass Lazy Susan at the center of the table. Face down, the meat along it’s is exposed and sliced into rectangular portions. The snout, a hard knob of skin the color of mahogany, is pointed at the elderly who are served first.
The exterior of a Chinese banquet hall may be misleading.
I don’t really speak Chinese. When people ask if I do, I say, “I speak a little.” I give a
My dad wants me to help him do some work at his office on Sunday, but it’s late Saturday night and I’m hurtling down the New Jersey Turnpike in the backseat of my boyfriend’s parents’ Honda. I’m on the phone, trying, in my broken Chinese
The car zips along the highway, past closed shopping malls and empty parking lots, towards their house, one of many newly built houses that, along with a man-made lake, comprised the town of Sayreville. A water tower with the town’s name emblazoned across the tank looms over the highway exit we get off at.
It’s late Saturday night and I’m hurtling down the New Jersey Turnpike in the backseat of my boyfriend’s parents’ silver Honda. I’m on the phone with my dad, trying to tell him one thing or another in my broken Chinese. Something about helping out with his work, something about the plans my mother and I made with him to go away for the weekend. Every once in a while, I give up completely and just use English, hoping he understands. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t, a strange sort of language barrier.
Later, Allen’s dad tells me that he is surprised by how good my Chinese is. He doesn’t exp