Cheetos and pink soda sprayed all over me on the subway

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I’ve been living in New York for almost 16.5 years now. Before that, I spent four years coming to New York as a tourist. So in total, I’ve spent 20+ years walking the streets and frequenting the subway here across all boroughs. In that entire time, I’d never really had any type of “incident” happen to me on the subway…. until today.

I was already having an annoying day. I got my period a bit early yesterday, which led to a night of interrupted sleep due to cramps. They seemed to subside in the morning after I took some paracetamol and did some cardio and pilates at the gym. But my cramps came back this afternoon, and at around the same time, I started feeling a little feverish. But I insisted to Chris that I needed to go outside, so I’d still go out to pick up Pookster. When I got to the train station, the train was delayed; I had to wait 12 minutes for the next train to Chinatown. When I finally got on the train, it was packed. I stood there like a sardine in close contact with pretty much everyone else on the train… Until out of nowhere, I felt this cold liquid spray my back, legs, and shoes. At first, I thought the guy had projectile-vomited on me until I saw his Sprite bottle, which had pink liquid in it. And it had this strange odor… which I immediately realized was Cheetos, the fried cheese snack that I haven’t eaten since I was a kid. The guy who was holding it seemed totally unfazed with the pink soda bubbling over and flying all over the place; all he said was “oops!” And nothing more. As soon as I realized what happened, as if involuntarily, I yelled out, “What the fuck?!” and everyone around me, despite being packed, tried to make space and avoid the Cheeto-pink soda freak, who kept looking down and seemed like he was either high, drunk, or both. At least four or five other people got hit the freak’s Cheeto pink soda mixture, including a man in a suit sitting down near where he was standing, who took almost every tissue out of his pockets and laptop bag to wipe himself off; all the tissues were drenched with pink and orange. I gave him a sad look, which he shared back. All these people around us gave us sympathetic looks; one of them even gave me a light pat on the back as he exited the train. I got down to Chinatown as soon as I could, picked up Kaia, came home, and immediately took off all my clothes and threw them in the wash. I tried to scrub my Uggs as best as I could. I was NOT happy.

I love public transit. I really do, especially as someone who hasn’t driven a car since she was 21 and has never enjoyed driving. But this is one of those moments where I thought, “So, this is why people prefer their cars…”

The Vietnam (American) War from the eyes of a Vietnamese person

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In my adulthood, I’ve tried to find more books to read that would educate me about China and Vietnam, my father and mother lands, that are written from the perspective of people who are actually Chinese and Vietnamese. It’s been a pretty big mix of movies, documentaries, fiction, non-fiction, and perhaps one of my favorite book genres — historical fiction. It’s been easier to find books on Chinese culture and the Cultural Revolution. It’s been more of a challenge to find books that are written on Vietnam’s rich history (especially the French colonial period and the Vietnam War) that are NOT told from an American or European perspective, but rather that of a native Vietnamese person. Then I finally stumbled across a book recommendation in my Modern Asian Moms (MAMs) group called The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai. From the first page, I knew it would be an easy read, a real page turner of a book. And oddly enough, it was just published in 2020, so it’s a relatively recent book. Some people criticize the book and say the language is too simple since the book was written in English, which is the author’s second language after Vietnamese (someone on Good Reads actually complained that he had to look up words in a dictionary only a handful of times as a person who knows English as a second language… because apparently, that should be the barometer of “complex language”).

When I say the book was an “easy” read, I meant that it took no time to get into the story. It’s actually a really hard book to read when you think of all the brutal portrayals of hardship, death, rape, hunger, and exposure to Agent Orange and its effects on not just the people it physically touched, but future generations; one baby born in the book (this was a time pre ultrasounds) was born without any arms or legs; she had a forehead that was three times the size of her body, and she died within seconds of being born. But it made me realize even more how flawed the western portrayal of the Vietnam War was, as it was nowhere as simplistic as it was taught to me in school. There were people in the North who were recruited to the Southern Army and vice versa. There were many people who were pro French and actually reaped plenty of benefits of French colonialism. And there was a mass re-education camp that was like a prison after the war, which pretty much everyone on the Southern Army was forced into. The land reform of the 1950s created immediate violence and destruction across all of Vietnam; people who were wealthy were stripped of everything they owned and many were executed publicly and brutally.

I thought about what my mom said about growing up poor and the contradictions of the stories she shared. Her dad, my paternal grandma, died when she was only 6, from choking on his own mucus. But he was a highly educated man who was fluent and literate in both Vietnamese and Chinese. She said in her younger days, her dad was a respected “high official” in government. What that meant for her family once the war started, I’ll never know because my mom doesn’t like to talk about it. I don’t even think she’d like to know I’m reading books on Vietnam or the war at all. She seems to want to wipe all that out of her memory, which is not unlike many others who lived through that difficult period in Vietnamese history.

There are two protagonists we shift point of view from in the book: the grandma in the 1950s and her granddaughter in the 1970s. The grandma says, “Do you understand why I’ve decided to tell you about our family? If our stories survive, we will not die, even when are bodies are no longer here on earth.”

It’s the stories of our families, of our lives that keep people alive. And though I’ll probably never fully know my mom’s stories of Vietnam, I’ll have sources like this historical fiction book for me to lean on for at least a glimpse of what she experienced.

Roasting “whole” chickens, bones, and stock

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After 2.5 years of never buying any whole chicken, I finally got a whole, organic, air-chilled chicken from Whole Foods this past week since it was on sale. Nowadays, I always chuckle a little to myself thinking about “whole chickens” in the U.S. because when you buy a “whole chicken,” it is never really whole unless you are getting it alive or directly from a farm and asking for it to be presented to you in a certain way. What I mean is: if you pick up a whole chicken at Albertson’s, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or a related grocery store chain, your “whole chicken” will have no head, neck, or feet attached. All the organs will be removed. And of course, it will be completely de-feathered. If you buy a non-kosher bird, you’ll likely have a little wax packet on the inside cavity of the bird that contains its heart and neck. Our experience of buying a “whole chicken” in the U.S. is so far removed from, say, how people buy “whole chickens” in Asia. I remember going through different markets in countries from Vietnam to Thailand to Cambodia and actually seeing the legs, claws, necks, and heads still attached. People would freak out here if they saw those things. While I don’t necessarily have any desire to gut or defeather a chicken I am cooking, I would appreciate having things like the feet still in tact or at least included; all those chicken feet could be gathered for some collagen rich chicken stock, which I always like to make after I roast at least two chickens, save all the bones, and have enough vegetable scraps gathered in my freezer. 

I spatchcocked my chicken, removing the back bone and flattening the body, and roasted it for 45 minutes undisturbed. While it roasted, I made an au jus with the chicken neck I cut up, along with some mirepoix, water, and my remaining dry sherry I use for cooking. I reduced it and strained it. And we had the chicken. I forgot after all this time how satisfying it was to roast a whole bird (“whole” in the American sense). I realized how much I missed doing this more semi-regularly and accumulating all my roasted bones for stock. Most of the stock I’ve made this year have been vegetable or bean based, plus a couple dashi batches I made from seaweed and bonito I got from a Japanese market. I made a mental note to make chicken stock more regularly next year. 

Friends you make in your youth vs. friends in your adulthood

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One of my good friends from my last company has been in town this week for work, so I met her for breakfast this morning after over a year of not seeing her. We talked a lot about work, the tech industry in general, layoffs and disguised PIPs (“performance improvement plans”), health insurance, politics, and family. I still remember when I met this friend over a Zoom call for the first time about seven years ago. I had been at the company for about six months; she had started a few months after me. But as soon as we started talking, I knew we clicked. It was like love at first conversation. I remember loving the sound of her boisterous laugh and loving how unrestrained it was. We were both loud, opinionated, laughed a lot, and loved food, cooking, and travel. She was like my West Coast equivalent on my team at the time. And since then, we’ve always confided in each other regarding all the work bullshit and hypocrisies around us. We no longer work at the same company, but we’ve stayed in touch. She’s one of a small handful of former colleagues from my last company who I still chat with and see. 

I was thinking a lot about friends I’ve made in my adulthood vs. friends I’ve made in childhood (K-12), and especially thinking about friends I’ve made in the last seven or so years of my life. The friends I’ve made in adulthood, as you’d predict, have values that more align to what I have. Relatively speaking, they are no-nonsense, ‘say what they think and mean’ people and don’t really tolerate much bullshit. They don’t say something to your face and say something different behind it. My good friends from childhood avoid confrontation like the plague; my adulthood friends confront stupid shit head on and stop it before it spirals out of control. They’re all striving to do something important with their lives and contribute to society. A lot of the friends I have kept from my childhood days are friends because of legacy; if I met them today, we’d unlikely “click” and become good friends. But I think all that is to say that different friends serve different purposes in your life. The friends you meet today and spend at most a couple hours a month with are less likely (due to time constraints) to reach the same comfort level of friends you’ve spent literally hundreds of hours with during your childhood; the context is just different. I’m lucky to have a happy and healthy selection of friends from both childhood and adulthood to keep me grounded. 

New friends in your 30s – an investment of time and energy

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This late afternoon, I met up with a new friend I met at the Sambal Lady’s Rendang Hang in mid October. While that event was fun and the food was delicious, I had to balance all the food and the bits of socializing with running around and making sure Kaia didn’t get her hands on anyone’s beer or ended up tearing all of Auria’s plants up. Kaia’s silliness and running around led me to the table of this friend that I ended up meeting with today. She clearly liked children, seemed friendly and outgoing, and like she could be someone I’d get along with. So after some chatting interspersed with running after Kaia, I suggested we exchange contact information (on Instagram first, just in case she thought I was some freak) and maybe meet up in the future. 

We met at a cafe in Nolita and had house-blended ube lattes while discussing the election, politics, life in multiple parts of the world, familial expectations, mental and physical health, college, work, family, and travel. We really packed a lot into almost 2.5 hours of conversation. I found the conversation really stimulating, like the kind of conversation I wish I had more of but don’t have the opportunity to have as much as I’d like given my remote work situation, child rearing, and general life responsibilities. Part of it is that I find it refreshing and stimulating to chat with people who work outside of my tech industry bubble; I learn about industries I have little to no exposure to, and that is always enjoyable and humbling to me. But the other part of it is that I love meeting people who have had very different experiences than my own in general. My friend has lived in four different countries throughout her life, and so she brings an interesting perspective to U.S. politics and also just life philosophy. 

I’m turning 39 in a couple months, and many would already consider me “middle aged.” As I’ve gotten older, especially into my 30s, I’ve realized how much harder it’s been to make friends. We don’t have the endless amounts of leisure time we once had while in school or during summers or school breaks. So now, when I meet people who I find genuinely interesting, even if it’s for just a few minutes, I’ve realized I should take the leap and suggest meeting up for a coffee or meal. The worst thing that could happen is they say no or ghost me, and well, I’m tough and confident enough in my own skin now to not let that bother me if it were to happen. Life is short, and I’ve thought about that more so at two specific junctures of my life: when Ed died, and then after I gave birth to Kaia. Our time should be spent with people we care about who we respect and want to spend time with, people who make us feel full and full of life. So, that’s what I am trying to do with the few new friends I have been lucky to make in the last several years — make a real effort to be in touch with them and spend time with them, getting to know them deeply. 

Losing hair – the areas of concern for aging men and women

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While on a customer call with a colleague this morning, we waited for our customer to join and made some small talk. My colleague asked how Kaia was doing since I told him that I had to pick her up early at school the previous day due to a fever she had. I shared with him that she was at home with us today, and Chris and I were tag teaming between meetings to care for her. He laughed and said, “Yeah, it never gets easier. And my kids are the reason I have bags under my eyes that won’t go away and far less hair on my head!” 

I told him that while all that may have a hint of truth to it, he and the male species were not alone in their hair loss. While men lose the hair on their head, women start losing hair in our eyebrows, I lamented. I was certainly not immune to this. In fact, I remembered that at some point in my mid-30s, I started plucking my eyebrows far less frequently… because the hairs just weren’t growing back, or were growing back far more slowly. I’d never had thick, well defined eyebrows in my life, but once my mid-30s hit and then pregnancy and childbirth, it’s like it’s been all downhill for my eyebrows ever since. 

He chuckled at my comment. “Yeah, but at least with women, you can just draw them back on and it can still look natural. Men can’t draw back the hairs on their head and make it look believable!” 

Well, touche. He wins. 

Kaia jumps into the water

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On Sunday and Monday, Kaia had swim lessons on back-to-back days since we had to schedule a makeup class from last month. I took her to class on Sunday while Chris had a dentist appointment, and Chris took her to the makeup class on Monday. In the last month, she recently graduated from level 2 swim to level 3 swim, which some people remark and (half) joke that it could be considered more of a “graduation” for parents than the kids: once level 3 starts at British Swim School, the caretaker/parent no longer needs to be in the water with the child. The child has to clear several requirements, though, including being able to float on their back unassisted (the instructor keeps their hand under their back just in case) and being able to not cry/be content without the caretaker/parent in the water. 

Chris got a really good video of Kaia jumping into the water on Monday. The instructor asked her to jump in, and seconds later, without even a hint of fear on her face, she simply jumped in, then rotated onto her back on command from the teacher. Her usual teacher was doing admin work that day at that pool, but he’s in the background of the video watching. When she eagerly jumps in, his whole face breaks out into a huge grin. Clearly, Chris and I are not the only ones proud of Kaia Pookie! 

I played the video several times and marveled over her bravery and eagerness in the water, and she’s not even three years old yet. I feel so happy and proud that she’s done so well with swim lessons so far and that she’s quite fearless overall. I was never as lucky as she was when I was her age to have swim lessons this young. I didn’t even learn to swim until I was 15, and to this day, I’m still terrified of open and/or deep water. In my summer swim classes I took after sophomore year, I never graduated from free-style swim strokes to diving. So I’ve never properly learned to dive either. Even though I didn’t have those things, I’m so happy to give Kaia the opportunity to have what I didn’t have. I can live vicariously through my baby. And I’m also grateful she has teachers who are clearly passionate about her achieving swimming mastery. 

Bo kho and lemongrass

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I had two pounds of beef chuck leftover in the freezer from a Costco run back in the spring from an original bulk purchase of four pounds of beef chuck cubes. I used the original two pounds for beef rendang using the Sambal Lady’s rendang spice blend. The second two pounds were TBD what I wanted to use it for, but after being reminded of bo kho, or Vietnamese beef stew with lemongrass and five spiced powder, I decided that this would be my next stewed beef dish. 

I’ve had bo kho a few times in restaurants, but I’d never actually made it before despite it being fairly straightforward to make. It’s made with beef chuck cubes, five spice powder, whole spices like star anise, clove, and bay leaf, aromatics like garlic, ginger, and freshly pounded lemongrass, and fish sauce as seasoning. You add carrots and pureed tomatoes for additional flavor and body. It’s braised for several hours until the beef is fork tender and the liquid is reduced down into a thicker liquid, great on top of noodles and rice. Oftentimes, if you order this dish in a restaurant, it will be served with a fresh baguette to dip into the stew juices. 

While I was preparing this dish, I realized that I actually hadn’t purchased any fresh lemongrass since we lived on the Upper East Side. I had forgotten how aromatic and delicious it was. The reason I haven’t bought it is that lemongrass is pretty annoying to prepare. It’s hard, woody, and annoying to chop properly so that you can actually eat it. In this stew, you don’t eat the lemongrass pieces; they need to be plucked out because they’re used just to flavor the stew. I ended up having to spend all this time manually picking out all the pieces after braising so that I wouldn’t have to annoy myself or Chris later with picking it out while eating. 

After several hours of braising and reducing the stew liquid down, I tasted the stew and decided it was done. As I started ladling it into my storage containers last night, I realized that in a time when I feel like I have little control over the world and life events, the few things I do have control over include what I cook and eat. And cooking is something I enjoy all the time, and it especially provides comfort during a time when I feel like the world is loveless. So I will savor this stew tomorrow and try to hope for a brighter tomorrow. 

The reasons to keep fighting

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It would be easy to write off the 74 million-plus people who voted for Dipshit and just sit here and be disillusioned… if I didn’t have a child of my own who has to inherit this world and live in it. But now, I’ve been sitting here, reading headlines, different publications, points of view that outline what the Democratic Party potentially did to create the total annihilation it has experienced this past week. Lots went wrong. A lot needs to change with the Democratic Party. A lot needs to change with education and disinformation and how it’s handle and addressed that will not be fixed in the next two, four, or 10+ years. But we have to keep fighting the good fight… even when those against us are just trying to kill us all.

I had the day off from work today for Veteran’s Day, as did Kaia from school. So this morning while Chris was on a call, I took her down to our building’s play room and brought along her favorite bubble machine (which I procured from my local Buy-Nothing group). I watched her gleefully run around with it and spread bubbles everywhere. She giggled, squeaked, and ran around endlessly to spread bubble literally all over the freaking room. I documented her joy through photos and videos. I stopped and just watched her in all her youth and innocence. And I just thought… she deserves a much better world than this. When she is older, how are Chris and I going to explain to her that the first presidential election she was around for, this country elected a convicted felon with a track record for spewing hate? Is this going to teach her that you can get away with literally everything you want as long as you are some rich White man?

This last week, my limbs have all felt heavier. Yet when I check my weight on the scale, I’m the exact same freaking weight. Even walking around and doing day-to-day tasks feels like it’s all been such an effort. But I have to throw myself into life and the future for the sake of my Pookster. I have to set an example for how she should be. The last thing I want is for her to repeat the line that I’ve said about my parents, the line that I read in Julia Child’s book My Life in France, which she wrote about her own regressive father: “He is an example of how not to be.” I’ve done a bit more cooking and food prep. I started reading a book that I’d been on the Libby / NYPL wait list for, for nearly five months, called Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa. It documents the life of a young Palestinian woman who lives as a refugee in Kuwait, then Jordan, then goes back to Palestine and becomes “radicalized.” I thought the title of the book was quite fitting for my general sentiment the last week, if not moving forward.

The internal family relations continue to deteriorate

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My cousin has spent the last several days texting me constantly to complain about our Trump supporting uncle and how consumed with disinformation and conspiracy theories he is. While my cousin is obviously angry and in strong disagreement with our uncle’s political (and well, intellectual) stances), the part he is most consumed by is how he believes our uncle talks to all of us like we’re imbeciles and don’t understand anything about the world. He’s stopped responding to my uncle’s political rants talking down to him and my other cousin. He said he’s likely going to cut him off completely. It’s a fair thing to be upset by, and for the most part, I’ve chosen to ignore it and avoid topics pertaining to politics as a result of it with my uncle. Because like with most of my family, while I love him, I do not like him as a person. Any unbiased bystander who knew what my uncle has done in his life would say that he’s not a good person, as unfortunate as that may sound.

His sexism stems back to his hatred of his mother. He’s made many generalizations about the intelligence of women over the years. For some reason, this is one that stood out to me as the stupidest and most inaccurate: He once said that when a car crash happens, a man and a woman will never have even remotely the same account of the events that led to the crash. A man will tell you how the accident happened, who hit who, from which lane/side, approximate speed. A woman will focus on what the person was wearing, what kind of makeup or hairdo they had, and all the superficial details that don’t have anything to do with the crash. I remember making the comment that I had never heard of anything like that, and he brushed me off, saying I hadn’t experienced enough of these situations.

My uncle has also repeatedly made comments about how much I shop at stores and malls, even though I’ve repeatedly told him that I actually detest shopping and trying on clothes. If you know my shopping habits even remotely, you will know that I hate in person shopping for clothes. And he has repeatedly laughed me off and said, “Suuure, you don’t! All women love to shop!”

As for how he treats other women? He once intentionally poured boiling hot oil over a sewing job that my grandma had worked on for weeks, simply to spite her. He once threw a knife at my grandma. While my grandma spent six months laying on her death bed, he declined all our invitations to visit her. He claimed he went to see her alone just one time in that six months. She was paralyzed on the left side of her body, and he said that when he tried to hold her hand, she barely responded (maybe that’s because she was… paralyzed and could not speak???!). He has accused my mom of stealing with little proof. And the one girlfriend we know lived with him around the time of my grandma’s funeral confided in my aunt and told her that he was verbally abusive to her. He constantly belittled her, told her what to do, and eventually, as everyone saw coming, the relationship ended and she moved out. When I was an adult, I asked my uncle why their relationship didn’t work out. He told me that she was an illicit drug user, and while he tried to get her to quit, she refused. Who knows – that may have been true, but I am sure that the part his ex told my aunt was also true, as well.

My cousin is 17 years older than me, so this year, he is 55. While I’ve always looked at him as a kind, generous, good-hearted person, I have not always looked at him as a particularly deep, introspective person who can see nuance. I saw all these flaws about my uncle ages ago, yet it took all this time for my near-retirement cousin to see all of this just now. I suppose late is better than never.