I haven’t slept through the night in over a week because I’ve been waking up to cough up mucus or vomit. It hasn’t been fun, and it’s been very exhausting on my entire body. Lucky for me, last night was probably the first night I successfully was able to sleep more than four consecutive hours. I think I slept about six. I had a lot of different dreams throughout the night, but this one was the most vivid.

I was at my parents’ house, sick and in bed. My mother, as per usual, is nervous and not sure what to do. She’s pacing around the kitchen and bathroom attempting to locate the correct cough medication to suppress my coughing. “I think this is the one! Is it?” she’s asking herself.

Ed comes out of nowhere and passes through the kitchen. He quietly opens the kitchen cupboard, pulls out a bottle, and hands it to her. “This is the right one,” he said. He takes a quick look at me, and we make eye contact for a few seconds. And then, just as quietly as he entered, he leaves and shuts the door behind him.

He comes to save the day, and then he leaves.

For the last couple of years, my mother in law seems absolutely hell bent on getting her second born a girlfriend… or, wife. She’s seemingly terrified that he’s going to be single forever, and she doesn’t seem to understand why he can’t find someone. I guess its the blindness that affects most parents who think their children are perfect (or, well, western or heavily western influenced parents, since as we all know that most stereotypical Asian parents like my own think their children are the exact opposite of “perfect”). The rest of the family occasionally makes comments that they hope he will find someone. They always say how sweet he is, but also make jokes on what kind of girl would be able to put up with him. Hmmm.

I really hate situations like this. Listening to people obsess about why anyone is single or not single or whatever their relationship status is is so pointless. I think everything happens when it is supposed to happen, and when we rush things or create artificial situations, then we’re increasing the chances of disaster.

However, in my brother-in-law’s case, I will say that there are a number of glaring reasons that I can see why he’s been single for so long: he’s a bit selfish, he’s coddled by his entire family to the point where he can’t seem to do even basic things on his own (like… clear his dish and put it in the dishwasher, not even wash it), and he’s in general very clueless about proper etiquette and behavior, and when called out on it, instead of reflecting on the situation and seeing how he may have been wrong, he instead chooses to get defensive. Here’s the most recent example:

I’m obviously not feeling well, and we’re flying back from Auckland to Sydney to spend the night before boarding our Sydney to LA flight back to the U.S. (it’s what we do when we fly Qantas). We’re spending the night with Chris’s brother, so I thought, okay, I’m not feeling well, so maybe he can get me some soup nearby. I texted him a few hours before arriving and asked if he could get me some hot soup. He said, “Sure, I’ll make sure to have something ready.” When I walk through the door, he hands me a packet of tomato soup powder. “I wasn’t sure what kind you wanted, but here.”

When someone tells you she wants some hot soup, the proper response is to get that person hot soup, REAL HOT SOUP that can be eaten right away, not a packet of artificial powder that you then hand to her and ask her to make for herself when you know she is ill.

Not to mention that, but he knew I was ill, yet he didn’t even have sufficient blankets for us to sleep with. He handed us a crochet throw blanket that by design, had holes all over it, plus a sleeping bag that was really enough to keep just one person warm, and there’s also Chris sleeping with me. And because Chris knew I was ill, he gave me most of the blankets while he was cold.

I told my friend this story without mentioning names, and the fury in her response was obvious. That’s inhumane, she said. “That’s worse than not even trying.”

I get that parents live in their own delusions and always think that their children are the best and that they’re perfect…. but his mom needs to realize that her son is severely lacking, and getting him a quick-fix wife is NOT going to be a solution to these types of insensitivities and lack of care for others.

We have an Amazon Echo named Alexa that we brought with us from the last apartment, which was from Chris’s work, and then when we moved into this apartment, Chris decided he wanted an Echo Dot for the bedroom. So Big Alexa sits in the living room while Little Alexa (the Dot) is in our bedroom. Chris likes to call them his second and third wives. I call them our house mates, and Chris’s mum calls them our house helpers. I wish if they were really helpers that they would actually help clean the house, but that’s another story for another day.

My parents have become very fascinated with Alexa. My mom likes to say hi to her when she comes back to the apartment, and she also likes to ask how she is doing. Once we came back home from dinner this week, and she asked me why I didn’t greet my “house friend.” My dad has been using Alexa to set alarms and to ask for the weather. When I showed my mom that Alexa can help turn on and off lights, she was bedazzled.

At least they are enjoying the new technology they are being exposed to.

New York City is a foreign place to my parents. They don’t really understand it (though my dad claims to… he doesn’t), and my mom always complains whenever she is here and says San Francisco is the best. She has since forgotten that she once lived in Vietnam because to her, it’s as though San Francisco is the only city that ever existed in her life.

So being foreign to them, New York City is a place where they first think of Flushing, Manhattan Chinatown, and Elmhurst. The only reason they think about Elmhurst is because I used to live there, and they visited me twice when I was at that roach-infested apartment. They think of those two Chinatowns because they feel comfortable being around other Chinese people. And they’re planning to go to both probably multiple times during their barely week-long stay here.

My mom could be good with directions if she actually tried, but she chooses to walk around blind, not looking at signs or familiar buildings, and freaks out if it seems like my dad doesn’t know where he’s going (which is a lot). She keeps commenting about how big all these buildings are and why there are so many people walking around all the time. My dad says he wants to go to places like Coney Island or the multiple model railroad stores he has read about, but when he’s actually here, he makes no effort to go and complains that he doesn’t know what their addresses are (even though he has easy access to a computer and the internet) and that they may be out of business. Their desire to explore is little to none, so I’m not quite clear why they are here.

There are a lot of people who have a hard time adapting to new or different environments. But I’m pretty sure that my parents are near the top of that list.

My parents are coming to visit next week. They haven’t been to New York since 2011 when my cousin got married, and that was when Ed came. Generally speaking, if Ed were ever with my parents, it was never a good time. They were always more on edge with him, quicker to anger and create public scenes of yelling and dysfunction, and basically blame him for every single thing that ever went wrong (including going downtown to Brooklyn when I’d ask them to meet me up town). With him, it was always his fault — or at least, they always saw it that way. This time, they’re coming with my aunt, but my aunt isn’t staying with us. And this is the only Manhattan apartment my parents will ever see or experience or live in. And they already thought my last place sounded fancy (they never visited that place) and was overpriced. They pretty much think any rent is too much unless it’s zero (that means… I’d be living at home. With them. But you already got that, right?).

So as you can imagine, my mom is trying to find every possible way to get me to tell her how much my rent is. She does this by throwing out random (usually very high) numbers to see how I react, if at all. She somehow started saying the apartment was around $6-7K, and I told her she was being ridiculous. “Oh, so it’s more?” I didn’t realize that’s what telling her being ridiculous would mean, but… okay?

No, it doesn’t cost that much.

Today, with my cousin and his wife in town for a wedding, I met up with them and my other cousin, his wife, and son for brunch in Soho this afternoon. The food was good, and things kind of went the way I thought they would. My cousin’s son stood up on his seat and refused to behave or eat any of the food that was presented to him, my cousin’s wife who lives here barely made any effort to talk to me or our visiting cousins, or to ask about our lives, and my visiting cousins ate their food and made small talk about what they’ve been doing in New York, in their last leg of their trip in London and Paris, and how the wedding last night went.

I’m sure my visiting cousin sets up these meals because he wants us to have a semblance of a functional extended family. He wants to make it seem like we’re “normal,” like we get along and actually want to see each other. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mind seeing him and his wife. They’re probably the most normal of the cousins on that side of the family in that they actually are relatively happy and healthy people, and they get along with most people and their families and try to be good human beings. But we rarely talk about anything that matters. I just started a new job. Why is no one asking me how the new job is going and what I’m doing there? Why is his brother not asking him about his Europe trip, which he just came back from? Why is no one other than his parents giving any attention to the little four-year-old at the table? Why aren’t we having a real catch up to discuss our actual lives and what is important?

Oh, that’s because that stuff is too deep, and we don’t want to have deep relationships with each other. I got it.