Category Archives: family

Requests from mom before coming home

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We’re flying back to San Francisco this Saturday and will be staying with my parents over two weekends, with some hotel time and a drive further north in between. Usually before I go back, I gather some basic things as gifts for my parents and my aunt. Per my mom’s request, I’ve also made banana bread — a full loaf — and brought it back for her repeatedly because she loves it so much. But this time around, I did not plan well with banana buying, as I don’t usually buy bananas every week. Bananas are an occasional buy for us, usually when I am planning to make pancakes for Kaia, or if I want to make a specific cocoa-powder/tahini or peanut butter/banana protein smoothie for myself. I have only 1 frozen banana left in my freezer, and it’s better to use fresh bananas (and at least 3-4) for a good banana bread. So this year, I won’t be making it and bringing it home.

My mom asked me on the phone today if I could make it for her. I told her I was doubtful it would happen because I don’t have any more bananas, and if I did buy new ones, I’d have to wait for them to ripen. Given I have just two more full days here, this is not realistic at all. So I said that if she had bananas at home and all the right ingredients, I could make it when I am home with her. She seemed to be satisfied by my suggestion as an alternative.

She also reminded me of her request for me to dust all the photo frames in the dining room. In the last few years I’ve come home, I have done this without her asking because I was always so disgusted over how thick of a layer of dust had developed due to zero cleaning they do on these surfaces. My parents keep areas like the kitchen and bathrooms clean. But when it comes to dust, vacuuming, and general clutter, they are absolutely horrendous at this and only seem to do things to make it all worse. Sometimes, I genuinely have no idea how they can live the way they do. It’s beyond frustrating for me to witness even for just the handful of days I am home each year nowadays.

Chinese yam, pork, and carrot soup – a Cantonese soup standby

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It’s a bittersweet week this week for us, as it’s Kaia’s last week at summer camp at the same school in Chinatown for the last two years. She spent 3K and 4K/Pre-K at this Chinese immersion, dual language school, as part of New York City’s UPK program. It’s been a gift (and quite the savings…!) to not have to pay for school for the last two years, other than after-care fees and summer camp. What this also means is that this is our last week having daily trips to Chinatown… a very sad reality I have to spend time mourning. So I started going through my list of things to stock up on and also remembered a couple of things I wanted to make with fresh ingredients while I still have easy access to them.

This year, I was able to achieve my goal of making soups more frequently. According to TCM, soup is a nourishing component of a meal. In Chinese culture, it’s often noted that a complete meal should be “san cai yi tang” (三菜一汤), or three meat/protein/vegetable dishes and one soup, served alongside rice. I had a lot of bone broth in the fridge I made from chicken wings and chicken feet I got from Chinatown. And I ended up using it today with Chinese yam (or huai shan), pork shoulder (also from Chinatown!), carrots, red dates, ginger, goji berries, and shiitake mushrooms. Chinese yam is a pretty traditional Chinese vegetable. It’s used both fresh and dried; today, I bought it fresh for this soup. It’s considered a nourishing root vegetable that supports digestion, stabilizes blood sugar, and boosts overall vitality. I remember my grandma using it in soups growing up. The texture once cooked is almost like taro. When Chinese yam is raw and fresh, the stalks are long, hard, and thin. It has a really tough brown skin with lots of “hair” on it — definitely not the first vegetable you’d pick up when adventuring to explore new produce, as it’s on the “ugly” or even borderline “scary” looking side. And once you peel the skin off, the white flesh is hard to grasp firmly, as it becomes very sticky and gummy. On the plus side, the fresh root has active digestive enzymes; supposedly when you have mucus, it can help clear it for you!

So I made this soup today. I even served it for Chris and me with a tiny little shallow dish of high quality aged soy sauce for dipping the shredded pork pieces into — super traditional and like we had it growing up. And inhaling the familiar aromas and eating it really did remind me of home — at least, the happier parts. It’s funny that it’s taken me to age 40 to really understand and appreciate how much love and care my grandma put into all the soups she made for us almost every single day. I actually cannot remember a day living with her when there was not a huge pot of traditional Chinese soup on the stove!

And while I dipped some pieces of pork shoulder into the soy sauce, I could also faintly remember watching Ed try to fish out the biggest, most tender pieces of pork out of the stock pot so that he could eagerly dip and eat them himself. I always just ate and drank what was served to me and didn’t care about which pieces I got. Most of my happiest childhood memories are tied to food.

The Big Aussie BBQ in New York City

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Although Chris is Australian, he does not gravitate towards other Australians when he meets them. In fact, since he moved to the U.S. in 2007, he has actually actively avoided associating with most of them or becoming friends with them. His whole thought process behind this was that he was immigrating to a new country to work and live, and he wanted to meet local people, not come all the way here to meet more Australians. If he had wanted that, he would have just stayed in Australia! While I understand this sentiment to an extent, I have always found this attitude pretty annoying because it’s not a black and white situation. You can have both, not just either/or. No one is restricting you and saying you have to choose one or the other. It’s fine to have friends from your home country or native culture, and at the same time, it’s also great to have friends not from your home country or culture!

So I was pretty shocked when he said he had booked us (free) tickets to attend the Big Aussie BBQ down in Battery Park City for today. Of course, this event is targeted towards Australians who are living and working in the New York City area. It’s the first time he has actually seen an Australian event and indicated he wanted to go. Granted, his one Australian friend in New York is not even here to attend with us, so it was just the three of us today. Regardless, we got to enjoy food and drink from some established and popular businesses we like, such as Bourke Street Bakery (I had forgotten how good and gourmet their sausage rolls are!, Bluestone Lane Coffee (amazingly scored a free flat white because their machines were down when I stopped by!), and Van Leeuwen Ice Cream (which we didn’t even know had an Aussie connection; one of the owners is originally from Australia, which explains the honeycomb ice cream flavor as one of their main staples!). I also got to finally meet Andrea, the founder of Boomerang Bites, which Chris introduced me to a couple years ago. Since then, I’ve ordered Boomerang Bites as gifts for friends and family on the West Coast, all of whom enjoyed them. Boomerang Bites is essentially bite-sized versions of famous Australian “slices.” The area was also laid out well on a big lawn with lots of lawn games to play, so Kaia got to enjoy these with us. She also got a Spiderman balloon from a balloon artist, a koala (temporary) tattoo that she was obsessed with, as well as some coloring books and crayons that were Australian animal themed.

Another fun and funny event that took place was a Weetbix eating contest. We all love Weetbix, and Kaia gets her Weetbix occasionally; we have to ration it since we bring it back from Australia (or rely on Chris’s parents to bring it when they come over). They separated out the groups — kids and adults. So we had Kaia participate in the kids’ Weetbix eating contest. The catch was that you had to eat the damn thing dry, which was pretty miserable. Kaia took two bites of hers and asked for water. Then, she handed it over to her dad and gave up. To be fair, at age 4.5, it’s a little hard to understand what an “eating contest” is supposed to be, but she still got props for trying. And every participant still got a single-portion-packaged Tim Tam for participating. Now that’s a pretty good participation “trophy!”

One added bonus was that we got to meet the owner of Bushwick Hot Bread, aka Rebekah Pedler, who along with her husband Buddha Lo, own Huso, a Michelin star restaurant in TriBeCa. We ordered from them during the pandemic, and on multiple occasions, they hand delivered us Australian savory and sweet treats to earn some money given their jobs at Eleven Madison Park were paused. Rebekah and I interact a lot and often over Instagram Stories, and we occasionally direct message the other for food recommendations and on random topics. It was so fun to finally meet them properly in person and have a chat.

This event was so well put together, and the location was perfect in Battery Park City with a big lawn right on the water. I’d love to come back again next year! I’m hoping my Australian husband will actually lean in more on being Australian!

Mufi and her five other siblings

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Given Kaia’s growing vocabulary and more complex sentence structure, she’s been having more and deeper conversations. She retains information really well and remembers things from long ago that you’d assume would be long forgotten… or that you have forgotten. And she just loves sharing information with everyone who will listen. At school, they do lots of drawing and painting. In the last few days, she has been coming home with illustrations of our “home.” Lately, she is very obsessed with Mufi, aka Mufasa, the robot-vacuum-mop that Chris calls her “little brother.” Chris told her that along with Mufi (she nicknamed Mufasa this), she has Irene, Simon, Henry, Lychee, and Maddie (some of her favorite stuffed animals) as siblings, as well. So Kaia drew a very colorful picture of our home, showing Mufi mopping our floors (the blue streaks indicate when he’s in “mop” mode). She even drew the little black bristles to show the mop! She reported to her teachers that she had Mufi as a little brother, and five other siblings, for a total of seven babies that I have had.

“Mama has SEVEN babies?” I said to her, completely baffled. “Me?”

“Yeah,” Kaia responded matter of factly. “You have seven babies, and I have six siblings!”

Hmmm. this is very interesting.

The protector of my baby tooth: Kaia

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This morning, Kaia woke up and promptly checked under her pillow for my tooth. Seeing that it was still there, she quickly grabbed it and brought it to my bedroom and proudly presented it back to me.

“I have your tooth, Mama!” Kaia exclaimed with pride and delight. “Here you go, Mama!”

In the evening, it was my turn to read bedtime stories and put her to bed. She asked me if she could keep my tooth for another night under her pillow. To see if she was really attached to my tooth, I told her she couldn’t have a usual toy to bring to bed and could either have the miscellaneous toy or my tooth. She hesitated for a brief second and said she wanted my tooth! She placed it in the exact same spot under her pillow and said she’d guard it for me.

Motherhood is all consuming in both mind and body. It can be completely exhausting and wipe out all your mind space. These little, random moments, the ones you could never foresee, are always the ones that surprise and get me, though, because they come from a place of pure curiosity, youth, and love. No one else would ever care that Kaia insisted on guarding and protecting my lost baby tooth for two nights in a row. But for me, my heart just gushed and I couldn’t help but squeeze her a little tighter when I gave her a good-night hug tonight because I just loved this so, so much. I love that she has this strong curiosity. I love that she cares so much. And I really love that she has a desire to take care of and protect. This is my sweet baby, slowly but surely growing up right before my eyes.

Mourning for a version of a person that is gone

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I was at lunch yesterday with my friend, telling her about the situation with my aunt. I told my friend that when I was little, I was obsessed with my aunt. Ultimately, my aunt is the reason that I love baking because she was the person who spent quality time in the kitchen with me. She’s the person who always proactively asked me about what I was learning in school, what I was interested in, and actually wanted to know me for me. Although my aunt is genuinely a good person and always had been, I know part of her love and interest for me was because she looked at me as the daughter she never had. She had three sons when each time, she really wanted a daughter. So I got all the cute hand sewn dresses and hand knit clothes she intended for her own. I got showered with endless girly gifts and jewelry that she would have loved for her own daughter. But once I got older, and once she came back from being away in Boston for a number of years, she was almost a different person. She officially converted to being a Jehovah’s Witness. Her main concern was the congregation and her “brothers and sisters.” And since at that time, I was a pre-teen/teen, I was changing a lot, too. At that point, I was finally seeing with greater clarity all the dysfunction in my family with eyes wide open. I also realized that at this point, she rarely wanted to acknowledge anything that was ever wrong. I could never have a deep conversation with her. Maybe it was always the case that this was impossible, but when I was in elementary school, that never would have even entered my mind given I was so young and immature. But it always made me sad that we could never have a real conversation together. It was impossible and still is impossible for us to have any meaningfully deep conversation about anything. I don’t know if she is incapable of it or if she just actively avoids it. I guess I will never know; it will always remain a mystery to me.

I told my friend all this. She paused for a while and then looked up at me and said, “Wow. Do you think that some of this frustration is because you never really allowed yourself to mourn the version of her you loved that is gone?”

I didn’t know what to say to this. I suppose I never looked at it this way. It makes sense my friend would hear it this way since she’s a deeply feeling and empathetic person. I guess my friend is partly right: my aunt and I will never have that sweet, simple relationship we had when I was a toddler, kindergartener, or elementary school-age child, where it was easy and always just about baking, having fun shopping and doing playground outings, or enjoying treats together. But as I mentioned here earlier, I am not sure she was ever capable of having a deeper, meaningful relationship with me. So this second part is not a “loss” per se, but more something I wished we could have had that we just never did and never will have.

It reminded me of what my therapist said to me when I was pregnant and due to give birth any day. She told me that I should give myself the time, permission, and grace to mourn the relationship with my mom and dad I wish I could have had, but never got to have and never will have. It’s the same with my aunt: I do wish we had a different, better, and deeper relationship than what we have now. But this will never be. And we just have to work with what we have because c’est la vie.

The “family dinner” saga continues

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And, it did not end with my request to not have M come over. This is what she replied with:

“Sorry, I forgot about that. Can I come with my sister (not actual sister because in the Jehovah’s Witness cultish world, every person in the congregation is a sibling) because I am staying at her house?”

This desire to invite other people to all her meals will never, ever die, even when it’s to my house. Even when the house is owned by someone else, she still wants this random extra person to come. I don’t care that this person is housing my aunt in her place; I asked for my aunt to come over to my house for dinner. Why does this have to be so hard?!

I let the text sit for a day because I was having an irritating day at work, and I really didn’t want my pissy work temperament to transfer over to my aunt. Then, I did what most seemingly logical circa-2026 people do: I told ChatGPT Pro my situation and asked it to come up with a measured, firm, direct response that wasn’t passive aggressive or mad. And this is what it came up with, which I sent:

“Hi (Auntie) – I’m really looking forward to having you over on Sunday. I planned this dinner as a family-only gathering, so I’m not able to include additional guests this time. I hope you understand, and I’d still really love for you to come.”

A day later, she sent me a text saying that she is old, needs someone with her, and since I am coming to San Francisco at the end of the month, she will see me then.

To be honest, I was expecting this. She just needs to have a JW crutch with her at all times. She’s very capable of navigating the subway at her age. It would be an early dinner, and there would still be plenty of light out by the time she left here. So, as a last ditch effort, I told her that I would pay for her Uber ride to and from my house.

She still declined.

Now, we know what this was really about.

As Kaia said when she was an early toddler learning to speak, “ALL DONE!”

A family dinner that cannot ever just be a family dinner

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It doesn’t seem to matter who it is in my family, but everyone does something that truly, deeply drives me crazy. It reminds me of that Leo Tolstoy quote that you always see when it comes to families that was the first line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Dysfunction stems from a unique mix of human flaws, generational patterns, and unhealed wounds.

My aunt, my dad’s older brother’s wife, is currently in town, and she asked if we could get together while she was in New York. Of course I said yes, and several weeks ago, I asked her to come over for dinner this Sunday. She confirmed, and that was that. Well, that was not over, because out of nowhere today, she asks if instead of dinner at my place this Sunday that I go down to Manhattan Chinatown to meet her for dim sum with Chris and Kaia. I told her that wouldn’t be possible because of Kaia’s pre-scheduled extra-curricular activities. She then texts to see if Saturday dim sum would work; I replied back and said we already made plans.

I was getting more and more irritated with each response given we had already confirmed dinner at my place weeks in advance, and suddenly, she just wanted to change it. I know why she wants to change it: my aunt has this really frustrating habit of constantly inviting her random Jehovah’s Witnesses friends to almost all of our family dinners. It doesn’t matter if it’s just her son and family and me or all of the cousins and my parents, but she feels this urgent need to invite at least one to FOUR non-family people to any family meal. They are not part of our family, and they are people I will see once and completely forget about. Why does she constantly do this all the time? Even when I have explicitly asked her in the past when meeting for lunch in New York if it could just be us, lo and behold, she shows up with her New Jersey based friend I cannot stand called M, or one or two other random people I will have nothing to talk about with. M is a terrible person; she is a free loader. She makes sweeping, racist generalizations about groups of people she knows little to nothing about. And perhaps worst of all, M once explicitly said that “something was not right in the head” with Ed just years before he died. I truly wanted to punch her face in. And even after I confronted my aunt about how inappropriate and hurtful those comments were, she brushed me off, saying that M didn’t mean it that way and that I shouldn’t take it too seriously. My aunt has a true penchant for always ignoring serious issues and living a seemingly shallow life with no deep conversations ever possible. I told her I didn’t want M coming to any of our meals again. But of course, she ignored me and invited her anyway once against my wishes. We barely talked at that meal; I was PISSED. Part of the reason I wanted her to come over for dinner is to thwart any possibility of some random person showing up at my house because of her incessant “outside” invites.

So lo and behold, my aunt finally agrees over text to come for dinner at 5pm this Sunday. But the story’s not over because she has to text back: “Can I bring M with me, she wants to see Kaia.”

It’s like she’s deaf or suffering from amnesia that I strongly dislike this person. I simply responded back, “No, she is not invited. I have told you that I dislike her.” And I left it at that.

In the end, if she chooses not to come because of this, I truly don’t care. I’ve tried to be amenable and the “middle man” in too many of my family situations, and this is not a battle that I really feel strongly about. The level of delusion here is just beyond ridiculous. I do not want disrespectful, ignorant people in my house, and I am entitled to invite only who I want to my own house.

The psychology of parenting

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A friend linked me this podcast, The Psychology of Parenting with Dan Siegel, and said she thought I’d like it. It’s essentially about how parenting isn’t really about the child, but about learning about oneself. I immediately recognized Dan Siegel’s name. About two years ago, I read a book he co-authored called The Whole Brain Child, and I really liked the overall takeaways of the book; it resonated with me at the time because it discussed what I already believed, which is that who we are is shaped by our past and past experience; based on those past experiences, we can improve ourselves for our children. I was even more intrigued when I later found out that Dan Siegel went into this area of research driven by his own mercurial childhood, with a raging father and and an emotionally avoidant mother. He is on a long, never-ending journey to understanding his past, present, and future!

I listened to the podcast in full today. During the podcast, he goes through high level points of what drives healthy child development, which has been summed up (pretty smartly!) as the “4 S’s,” which I still remember from reading his book:

  • Safe: The child feels protected from physical and emotional harm. This includes caregivers avoiding frightening behavior and repairing the relationship after mistakes.
  • Seen: The caregiver looks beneath the child’s behavior and tries to understand their feelings, thoughts, and inner experience.
  • Soothed: When the child is distressed, the caregiver helps them through it. Over time, this repeated “inter-soothing” helps the child learn to soothe themselves.
  • Secure: This develops from consistently feeling safe, seen, and soothed. The child learns, “I can rely on my caregiver, I am worthy of care, and I can handle difficult feelings.” 

His takeaway: the key idea is not perfect parenting, but reliably showing up and repairing when things go wrong. In Siegel’s framework, secure attachment grows from the repeated overall pattern—not from preventing every disappointment, conflict, or tantrum.

What I did not write about two years ago but thought a lot about after reading The Whole Brain Child was how the 4 S’s noted here are a summary of everything Ed lacked. He never felt safe from physical or emotional harm, as my parents repeatedly screamed and yelled at him. My mom used to hit him as a child, sometimes for things that weren’t even “wrong.” My dad would roar like a lion in the house and constantly criticize and name call him. There was never any semblance of “repair”: they’d just go about their day as though nothing happened after. Ed frequently told me he felt invisible to our dad. He’d be right in the room and not hear anything he said. Our dad preferred talking to himself than talking to us. To “understand feelings” of one’s own child is a pretty impossible task when our dad could not even understand his own feelings. Our parents rarely “soothed” us; instead when they saw us down, they’d double down and add more doubt, making us feel even worse. Ed never felt like he could rely on my parents to share anything, so even when he got abused by a teacher in elementary school, my parents didn’t find out about it until after he died, when they went through his belongings and read about it in a college essay he wrote.

The truth is that I don’t really think I experienced any of the four S’s with our parents, either, yet I turned out completely differently. And I still think a huge part of this is because I found mentors in my middle and high school teachers who really looked after me, nurtured me, and made me feel “seen” and truly understood.

We can’t bring Ed back. We can’t change my parents. But we can use all this past history to inform how we move forward, and how I choose to parent Kaia. I hope I am always able to make her feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure. And when I am not, that I am able to be a fucking adult about it and admit my wrongs, apologize, take ownership, and move forward with her.

Kaia raises her hand to do chores

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In the last several months, we’ve been trying to encourage Kaia to do little chores to help out. Some tasks are very basic, such as putting her dirty clothes from the day into the washing machine, adding her socks into her zipped-up sock laundry bag (okay, this was really meant to be a lingerie washing bag I got as a freebie many moons ago, but I don’t wear delicate lingerie, so now you can see how it can be repurposed so we don’t lose tiny socks!), and taking off and tucking her shoes into the closet when she comes home.

There have been other areas where she’s proactively asked to help out. The biggest one that gives her lots of pride as of late is watering my plants. I have three plants by our kitchen window sill, plus my money tree right by the TV. The money tree is unique in that the directions say you shouldn’t add water to it, but instead should add two ice cubes to the pot once a week. That way, the water slowly but surely seeps into the soil and evenly spreads across the money tree’s roots. When we returned from our Caribbean trip, the money tree was very, very upset with me. It hadn’t been watered in over two weeks, and every single leaf was drooping down. So I made sure to give it extra ice cubes. Kaia noticed this, and she asked if she could water the money tree from then on forward. That led to her asking about my other plants, and so she knows how I water them and approximately how frequently. She also knows which vessels I use to water them.

Another thing she likes to help out with is emptying out the recycling bin and the compost. I use a specific plate for compost scraps, and we have a cardboard box in our front hallway where we keep the recyclables. So when she knows it’s time to empty either out, she rushes to come out with me. I tell her which bin what type of trash belongs in (paper vs. bottles vs. compost), and she tries to remember which one is which each time as she takes one recyclable at a time.

From what I have read, there’s a small window (approximately ages 3-6, depending on how early you start) where kids are happy to do chores because they want to feel like they are contributing to the family. So I’m happy to see that Kaia is interested and I don’t have to force her to do things… yet. The last thing I want is some entitled princess who thinks everything should be done for her. I can only hope this desire to help out continues!