Monthly Archives: March 2024

Trendy eats in Koreatown and how I cannot relate – it must be my age!

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So, I’m 38 years old now. Some people say age is nothing more than a number. Most people who meet or see me for the first time would be unlikely to guess my age and usually say a number that is far younger than what I am. But what getting older has made me realize is that my tastes are definitely changing, and the things that may have sparked my interest at age 18 or 28 are oftentimes not going to get me excited at my current age now.

Here’s a case in point: this new Korean “food court” recently opened on the corner of W 32nd Street and Broadway, right across the street from the main Manhattan Koreantown drag. Publications like Eater call it a “food court,” one that is getting a lot of hype right now. It’s been reported that it is attracting lines going down the block. Yet when I walked in, it was NOT what I’d call a food court at all. There was one main stand in the front that had a number of ready-made Korean foods (all the ones you’d guess: bulgogi, japchae, kimchi fried rice, etc.), a second that did coffee drinks, a third that made a trendy Korean “coin” cake that is either filled with nutella or corn cheese. When you go to the second floor, there’s only one stand: you order and pay for your choice of a packaged Korean ramen type, then you go to a number of water machines and add boiling water to a bowl, where you’ll “cook” the ramen.

This is not a food court in any sense of that meaning. This is a hangout spot for cheap, low quality food for tweens and teens. I am never getting food from here, ever.

No laptops in cafes = my heaven

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The biggest complaint I have about cafes in New York City is that for the most part, they are overrun by people on laptops and tablets. Everyone wants a trendy, fun place to sit, use free Wi-Fi, and work. So they go to cafes all over the city, squat at their tables and counters for hours on end, and hog up prime real estate that friends who wish to catch up in a casual environment would like to use — and are unable to use. I have lost count of the number of times I have tried going into a cafe, whether it was to catch up with friends or colleagues, or even to do college alumnae interviews, and I was not able to get a table/seat because of all these laptop users. It completely incenses me. Cafes are supposed to be for a) drinking coffee/tea and small bites, and b) SOCIALIZING.

So when I was pushing Kaia in her stroller around the Upper West Side this early afternoon, I was elated to see that a cafe that had ample seating (and space for the stroller) had a big sign in the front that said: “No laptops on weekends.” No wonder I saw no one with a laptop in there. This was my kind of place! I was too happy to give this place business. And Kaia stayed napping until I at least had my second sip of coffee. It was a good day, and a good find.

Tribeca: the most overrated neighborhood in all of Manhattan

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It was a very grey, cold, rainy day today, so we didn’t go too far, just down to Tribeca for some quick eats before heading home. But as soon as we got off the train and started walking around the neighborhood, I was reminded once again of why I couldn’t stand Tribeca: It’s one of the most pretentious, least diverse parts of all of New York City. The only restaurants worth going to in this area are for fancy tasting menu dinners, and even those that are worth going to in this area are dwindling. Pretty much everyone casually walking around and eating overpriced food is White. People who look like Chris and me contribute heavily to the diversity in this neighborhood. Every decent-looking cafe or restaurant is overcrowded and has a wait. Even in this sad weather, people were sitting outside in the cold, pretending to enjoy themselves with their friends, just because they were giving business to a trendy take-out eatery. This take-out eatery had absolutely no indoor seating, only outdoor (uncovered) seating. Almost all the food was ready made. So when I ordered a sandwich, it was already sitting there on the counter, much to my chagrin; it was NOT being made to order. The cashier just went over to pick it up and hand it over to me as he took my payment. The sandwich was cold. It was sad. Who the heck knows how long it had been sitting there getting soggy? And given it wasn’t made-to-order, it was overpriced and felt like an overpriced, over-hyped version of Pret a Manger or Le Pain Quotidien. Why, just why?

Also, with such proximity to Chinatown from Tribeca, why would I ever go to Tribeca over Chinatown…?!

Child rearing: the idea of raising a tiny human into an adult human, not infantilizing them

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I first came across the term “infantilization” in my early 30s. The term’s meaning is pretty self-explanatory: it’s about treating someone as a child perpetually, even when they are an adult. For children, it could mean treating someone in a way that is too young for their current stage of development. Anyone is capable of infantilizing another person, but the most common scenario is when a parent infantilizes their child, whether that child is still a child or a grown adult. The main reason that parents do this to their children, regardless of age, is control: they want to maintain power over someone and prevent them from being a functioning adult so that they can have a “need” for that parent forever.

I was thinking about infantilization this morning as I got Kaia ready for school. Almost a year ago, we had this routine of getting her ready each weekday morning for daycare/school. Chris would wake her, change her diaper, set her up for breakfast and go swim, while I would pack her lunch, make sure she was fed and dressed, and ready for Chris to take her to school once he was done with his morning swim and shower. About a year ago, getting her ready was a bit more challenging than now: then, she needed more encouragement and assistance in eating, whether it was with eating her Weetbix and milk with a spoon. It was harder to multi-task to feed her while also packing her lunch and cleaning. But now, she’s so much more self sufficient with her meals: she’s pretty much mastered eating cereal and milk with a spoon. She decides what she eats and in what order. I don’t have to watch her as carefully as I did a year ago with chewing food properly and swallowing. Nowadays while she eats breakfast in the mornings, I can usually get her lunch ready and dishes cleaned without much disruption (other than the occasional Cheerio or oat porridge strip flying somewhere…). Sometimes, when I’m really on an efficiency streak, I can even fully empty the dishwasher and wash, prep, and cut vegetables in preparation for dinner that evening. My little baby is maturing into an older toddler, and with that, she’s gaining skills that she will be using for life. While spoon feeding her occasionally is cute and fun, I do not wish to do it all the time, nor do I want it to take away from her learning how to use other utensils and becoming self sufficient as a growing human. I want my baby to grow and flourish and one day, become an independent (and hopefully thriving and confident) adult.

The sad thing that this triggered was the fact that I know my own parents infantilized Ed and me. In many ways, Ed never became a fully functioning adult who could make decisions for himself confidently and even talk about basic everyday topics because of how overly critical and controlling my parents were. They wanted to make all decisions for him, and when he was left to make decisions himself, he couldn’t: he just didn’t have the confidence to do it. They had us learn how to drive and get our drivers’ licenses, but then they never let us drive the car, saying “we had no experience” and “were too immature” to be trusted (how does one get experience… without experience?). Ed was never allowed to drive the car except to and from specific places (work and one specific grocery store). I was only allowed to drive the car if my parents were in the car with me. Whenever we didn’t do as well as they wanted us to in school, they always said we needed to be “more like the kids upstairs” (our older cousins, who were quite mediocre overall both in school and life) and said that if they got all A’s (this was a blatant lie), then we could, too, because they worked hard for us, so we needed to “work hard at school” for them.

There’s a lot of memories I’ve buried deep in my mind because they don’t do anything to serve me well in moving forward in life, and they only end up angering me. But I do get reminded of certain ones occasionally that I thought I’d completely forgotten about. But one that recently got dredged up because of some news article I read was how during my early twenties, my brother went back to the local community college to take math classes. He said he wanted to to try going to school again, and if he did well in this class, he’d continue enrolling in other courses, and maybe even use his credits to transfer to a four-year institution. It was such a shiny glimmer to me, that he could be taking a step in the right direction for himself and his own growth. And then, out of nowhere around the same time, someone either at his church or at work told him about a room for rent that he could consider. It was small but clean. He’d have to share a bathroom and living/dining/kitchen areas with another person, but he’d finally be independent and move out of our parents’ home. He called me multiple times and we talked it over. I insisted that he move, and the sooner, the better. But he was scared; he wasn’t sure he’d get along with the roommate. He was concerned with how small the bedroom he’d get was. He also told me multiple times that once our parents got wind of the idea, that they didn’t want him to move: our mom fought with him multiple times, screaming at the top of her lungs. She said that if he left, they wouldn’t help him with the move, and he’d have to move everything himself. He wasn’t allowed to remove “one single thing” from their house other than his clothes and his bed, even though Ed had spent a small fortune on pots, pans, kitchen supplies, and bedding and bath for the house with his small wages from Macy’s. It was so cold and threatening, so rooted in evil, hatred, and control. She just wanted to control him, and if he moved, she could no longer control him. She and our dad couldn’t put him down every single day — who else were they going to criticize daily if he left? At the end of the day, she was infantilizing him. Our mother felt threatened that her son, her oldest child, finally wanted to be an independent adult and not rely on her anymore, and that’s why she said these awful things to him. A normal parent would be thrilled that their adult child in his late twenties/early thirties would be moving out. But our parents aren’t normal. So Ed got even more scared, and he eventually declined the room for rent. And with that followed his downward spiral into a deeper depression and ultimately his suicide. He just kept believing that he was worthless, brainless, and stupid — just like our parents kept calling him to his face. Because when you get told you are something so many times, you eventually just believe it is fact. It’s like when very mediocre children get constantly praised by their helicopter parents — they end up thinking they are some gift from God and the best thing since sliced bread, and every single action they take must be perfection!

Our parents said and did a lot of awful things to us, but this specific event truly inspired a very deep-seated wrath in me against our mother, a wrath that occasionally gets ignited with specific memories and actions she continues to do. In this situation, as with others, she wasn’t helping a single person at all, yet she was so blinded by her desire for control of my brother. I kept trying to talk Ed out of his decision, but he insisted it was all done, as he’d already told the landlord he wouldn’t take the room. He eventually just told me to stop bringing it up at all. I suggested he look for other places, but he never did.

Our mom gets very sensitive when she hears we shared anything, anything, to anyone else about her and our dad outside our immediate family with others. The reason for this is clear: I think deep down, she realized what they were doing was wrong, and she feared external judgment and “losing face.” She used to repeatedly say that if we ever spoke about them to others, that we “talked against our parents, and God punishes disobedient children who go against their parents.” But, she probably never heard or believed the phrase, “The truth shall set you free.” But wait — didn’t Jesus himself say this?

I don’t want to infantilize Kaia. No well-meaning parent does. I do not want the environment my parents created for Ed and me replicated again. I want to watch her grow and be set free. I just hope she will always trust me enough to come to me and be herself. Because when you have parents who don’t trust you, who blame you for everything, who infantilize you, you will never be able to fully be yourself around them at all. My parents don’t really know me at all – they have no idea what I’m interested or passionate about, nor do I think they even care. They barely know my opinions on anything. But they made it this way, and there’s nothing I can do to change it.

Early childhood development: the universal stages

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Toddlers are a fun and exhausting group of tiny humans. I always loved learning about child development as soon as I got pregnant because I found every step of the way fascinating, especially as I was watching my own tiny human get bigger and bigger each day. While Kaia has been developing more of her own unique personality and traits, there are some things that just seem to be universal to all toddlers:

*Babies and toddlers tend to learn and say “no” and negative phrases (“don’t want/don’t like” or “don’t wanna!”) before they learn “yes” and positive phrases.

*Toddlers can go through a day of eating all of X food, then be completely repulsed by it the next day and refuse it, even throwing it off their table.

*Babies and toddlers absolutely love repetition, whether that’s of the game “Peekaboo” a hundred times or the same book read 10 times.

*When toddlers go through their tantrum phase, it’s like something innately goes off in them that forces them all to lay on the floor, face down, and just kick and scream.

I would love to hear the scientific or data-based reasons for why all the above tends to be universal?

Taiwanese popcorn chicken “oven fried” at home

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At the beginning of this year, I started reading more about Taiwanese cooking. Taiwan has a complicated identity, not just because of its connection to (and arguably, ownership by) China, but also because of its history of colonization by multiple countries. While a lot in Taiwanese and Chinese cuisine overlap, some argue that Taiwanese cuisine is a completely distinct cuisine all in itself because of its native people, plus previous colonizers. Whatever you believe is certainly debatable, but what I think is most definitely true and not debatable is that the cuisine of Taiwan is extremely tasty. And that in itself is enough to appreciate Taiwan and its food.

Over the years, I’ve enjoyed various iterations of Taiwanese fried chicken. Sometimes, they were deep fried cutlets, while other times, they were in the form of bite-sized, “popcorn” pieces that were fried to perfection. The chicken always had a hint of five-spice mix, but it also had an interesting “je ne sais quoi” umami flavor to it that I couldn’t pin down. I’d never had it in all the other variations of fried chicken I’d had previously, whether it was American, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Southern American. I just couldn’t figure out what gave it that distinct Taiwanese flavor that popped.

And then I stumbled across the journalist Clarissa Wei, an American with Taiwanese heritage who now lives in Taiwan. She has co-written a Taiwanese cookbook called Made in Taiwan and also wrote several food pieces for Serious Eats, including a Taiwanese popcorn chicken recipe with a description that explained that umami pop that was distinct to Taiwan’s version of fried chicken. The secret ingredient was furu, or Chinese/Taiwanese fermented bean curd! I never would have guessed it, but after reading her article, it completely made sense. Furu, for those who are not familiar, is a fermented bean curd that has a very, very distinct smell/taste that some might call stinky or funky. It is usually found stir-fried in vegetable dishes like water spinach or Buddha’s Delight / luo han zhai. It gives a strong umami flavor, like a more peculiar version of miso. I used this in the chicken marinade and marinated overnight. Then, I coated the chicken in a flour-baking powder mixture, then in a sweet potato flour mixture, which is supposed to give a lighter “crust” to the fried chicken.

Clarissa’s recipe calls for deep frying, which is traditional for Taiwanese popcorn chicken, but I didn’t want to do this given the mess and oil waste. Instead, I used an “oven fry” method I learned from Amanda Hesser of Food 52, who published her mom’s recipe for oven fried chicken. Instead of deep frying, she would add two tablespoons of butter/oil to a bake pan, put it in the oven at 400 F until it was fully melted and coated on the pan. Then, she would add her coated chicken, skin-faced-down, onto the super hot pan, put it back in the oven, “oven fry” (time depends on your chicken cut type, whether it’s bone-in, size of pieces), then flip over once that face-down side was super brown and crispy. She’d put it back in the oven, roast until fully cooked and the second side was brown. Finally, it would be pulled out of the oven and ready to serve. This merging of two recipes/methods really worked! I was so impressed by the results and kept marveling over how tasty the chicken was. It really did have that nice underlying “funk” to it, and the crispiness was very, very satisfying. While enjoying this chicken, I couldn’t remember the last time I was more impressed with something new I had made. This recipe was most definitely a keeper, and so was the oven frying method for pieces this small!

I guess this just means I’m going to have to read more of her book and maybe even buy it. I’ve always loved Taiwanese food, just never really explored it in depth.

Another personal item gets lost at daycare

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There’s no perfect childcare solution that exists. People always debate nanny vs. daycare. There’s also the idea that children are best at home with their mother (or father, if we’re choosing not to be sexist). But every option has its pros and cons. While I do prefer the higher level of accountability and levels of escalation with daycare vs. nanny, what is definitely true of both situations is that the end caregiver, whether it’s the teacher or nanny, doesn’t always want to take ownership for things that can go wrong.

In Kaia’s last classroom in her first week, I sent her to school with a metal fork in her lunch box. That fork never came back home. I asked the teacher at the time where it was. She got defensive, asked if I even packed a fork that day (that was a really fun response, especially since the photos from lunch that day clearly show Kaia using her fork), and said that she had no idea. She took no responsibility and didn’t even apologize. It’s clear that some careless teacher just cleared the lunch table and threw out the fork. Since then, I’ve never sent any eating utensil to school; there’s too much of a risk of it getting thrown away again, especially because of its small size.

Yesterday at pickup when I was gathering Kaia’s belongings, I realized that one of her two Stasher snack bags was missing. I went through her cubby, around the sink area, and into the fridge and freezer to see if someone had placed it in there. It was not anywhere to be seen. I asked the teachers in the multi-purpose room, who confirmed they never took the snack bag into that room. The manager tried looking for it and never found it. I sent a separate note in the daycare app to the teacher about it, who leaves each day before I pick up. She never replied to my message.

When Chris went to drop off this morning, he asked the teacher about the missing Stasher bag. She was nonchalant, saying she didn’t know where it was, and that maybe one of the kids took it and threw it out. Again, no big deal to her, and no apology or sense of accountability. Chris came home to tell me that we were unlikely to ever see it again.

Now, I have to spend more time and money replacing these items that these teachers take no responsibility over. I don’t even get an apology. Instead, what’s worse is that this teacher had the nerve to blame one of the other toddlers in the class! Every time they lose something, it’s more money that we have to spend, and since it’s not their money, they clearly don’t care at all. That was the same terrible attitude our ex-nanny had: every time she lost something, she would just say flippantly, “Just buy another one,” as though we had endless funds and could just spend on everything, any time!

Supercommunicators: laughter to connect with others

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Endless books have been written about how to “make friends and influence people,” create solid, lasting relationships, and ultimately to communicate better with others. I was recently listening to a podcast where the journalist Charles Duhigg was being interviewed, and he was discussing some stories he shared in his latest book called Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Power of Connection. He talked about some personal stories, like the types of arguments he and his wife have had and how they’ve improved on their arguing as a result of techniques he talks about in this book. But the part that really got me was when he discussed the simple act of laughter. Most of the time at a superficial level, when people see others laughing, they think they’re laughing because something is funny. But the majority of the time, people actually are not laughing because something is literally funny. They’re really laughing to build a connection with another person or to in some way “match” the emotions or sentiments of the person they are with. People who can “match” emotions (and there’s various definitions/principles around this) tend to be better communicators; those who don’t do this tend to be poorer communicators.

This reminded me of a very painful dinner that I sat through about 12 years ago. My good friend, who I was maid of honor for, wanted two of her bridesmaids and me to establish better rapport. My friend was temporarily living in New York for a year, and these two bridesmaids came to visit. She arranged for all four of us to have dinner together. We all went to high school together, yet I never clicked with her other bridesmaids. In high school, I found them boring, generic, drab, opinion-less, and humorless. I’m sure they had their judgments of me, but my “DGAF” attitude was already apparent back then. But I figured — so much time had passed since then, so why not try to give them another chance?

Well, that second chance was probably one of the most painful dinners I’ve ever had to sit through. We talked about a whole lot of meaningless nothing in between periods of extremely awkward silences, and while it may have lasted an hour or two, it felt like 10 hours of torture. Every time I shared any kind of opinion or anecdote, I was met with blank stares or straight faces. The many times I told dumb jokes or laughed, I was met with silence or shy chuckles with their hands covering their mouths. They didn’t share any interesting or insightful opinion about anything; they were exactly as boring as I remembered them to be in high school. I suppose time does not always change people.

I was triggered to remember this awful dinner because of what Duhigg was trying to say: laughter can connect people, and even if you laugh out of nowhere and the person next to you gives a little chuckle, they’re in some way communicating with you and “matching” your sentiments to build a rapport with you. Back then, it was hard to properly express why their lack of laughter bothered me so much, but after listening to this podcast about this “matching” principle, it completely makes more sense to me and how to convey why this was frustrating. Laughter isn’t just some empty thing that people do; we laugh to connect with each other. And when we don’t laugh, not only are we not connecting with those around us, but well, as Chris puts it, we’re probably just boring as fuck.

Toddlers learn that everyone and everything has its place: “You be here!”

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On Kaia’s floor bed, she has a regular pillow she sleeps on, two smaller pillows that Chris or I will put our heads on while getting her to fall asleep, plus a cushiony bed bumper between the two sets of pillows. Each night, she knows her side of the bed, though she will usually insist on snuggling up next to or on top of me as she falls asleep. Tonight, when I tried to move so that my body was actually on her side of the bed, she clearly was not a fan. She immediately yelled, sat up, pointed at the two smaller pillows, and said emphatically, “You be here!” She wouldn’t calm down until a few seconds later, when I obediently moved to “my” side of the bed and rested my head on the pillows. At that point, she smiled and lied down next to me, snuggling her head against my neck, stomach down, and eventually drifted to sleep.

Pronouns are a bit tricky for babies and toddlers. They tend to learn these later on, so instead of saying “you” or “I” when I talk to her, I usually say, “Kaia brushes her teeth now, or, “Mummy goes to shower now.” When Kaia says she wants something, she will say “Want” or “wanna” or “wanna wanna.” To date, she has not said “I….” anything. So it was actually pretty cute when instead of saying “mummy,” she said “you” in “You be here!”

The other thing that Kaia is quickly realizing is that everyone or thing has its place or place to be. And well, according to her, my place to be at bedtime is on my two pillows, not on top of her pillow.

Ear piercing and children’s autonomy

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I was two years old when I got my ears pierced. My mom took me to the doctor’s office, where they pierced my ears, and my mom took care of my ear piercings until they fully healed. There are many photos of me when I was 2 where you can see little shiny gold dots that are on each of my ears as proof of my piercing. At some point, my mom switched my earrings to small 24K gold hoops, which stayed in until I was about 3rd grade. This was when I started getting curious about other types of earrings and wore other ones (and immediately got infected because of the cheap metal on those earrings).

I looked back on my mom’s decision and actually liked it; I have zero memory of feeling any pain at the piercing or dealing with the healing of the piercings. My mom completely took care of it and remembers it. So I thought that eventually one day, I’d do that for Kaia and get her ears pierced at a similar age so she wouldn’t have to remember the pain of the piercing, or deal with the healing and treatment of the piercings after; this seemed so logical to me, as I’d be sparing her of the memory of the pain. The problem with this approach, as many people say today, is that this removes the child’s decision making from consideration; maybe she doesn’t want her ears pierced? If she doesn’t, then why are you as her parent putting her through the pain of going through this? Extremists compare ear piercing before an age of consent to things like genital mutilation or child marriage. I’ve always thought those comparisons were insane and senseless, as ear piercing is hardly in the category of either of those atrocities.

But now that Kaia is 2, I’ve had second thoughts about this. I don’t know if I want to do this to her and watch her go through the pain, even if it is brief, not knowing for sure whether she even wants it. Sure, I’d love for her to get her ears pierced and (like me) have no recollection of the pain or the healing of the piercings. I would love to buy her earrings to wear when she gets older and even go earring shopping together. But now, I think I’d be more comfortable doing it when she’s actually says she wants to have it done, and ultimately consents. And caring for the healing — this could just be part of her process of growing up and “taking care” of something of hers herself, with my supervision. And that’s not such a bad thing now, is it?

Every family has their decisions to make, whether it’s on big things like vaccinations, circumcision, and the smaller things, like ear piercing. I totally respect their choices (okay, minus the vaccination piece; if you aren’t getting your child vaccinated on a typical AAP schedule if you’re in the US, you’re just being selfish and sick), and to each their own. But I think I’ll wait until Kaia says she wants her ears pierced before we proceed with it. I’m happy that my mom got my ears pierced before I could remember. It’s like a bit of blissful ignorance in my childhood for me, especially since as a teen and an adult, I’ve loved having pierced ears, as earrings are my favorite type of jewelry. But I don’t want to look back one day and have Kaia begrudgingly remind me that I pierced her ears “without her consent” and that she’s traumatized that I subjected this to her before she could agree to it.