During our time up in the Sacramento area, we’re staying with my best friend from college, who recently moved here for work and also purchased a beautiful, spacious home. We had good timing in our arrival because in the weeks leading up to our visit, she was just starting to buy furniture for her guest bedroom. I was so happy for her to find out she was buying her own place, and in California of all places! After medical school, an interruption with medical school due to a sudden diagnosis of a rare lymphoma, treatment and recovery, restarting medical school, residency, and fellowship, she said she finally feels like an “adult” with an adult job and finally her own home. She’s been through so much personally. And now, she finally feels like she’s at a comfortable place in her life.

Well, sort of comfortable. Her brother was already living in Sacramento, and so when she secured her job offer up here, her mother immediately said she wanted to leave Arkansas to be closer to two out of three of her children. So her mom came out to live with her. Her brother ended his month-to-month setup at his apartment to temporarily move in with her while looking to buy his own home closer to the city center. And finally just this last week, her dad, after getting rid of the last items to give away or sell at their Little Rock home in preparation to close their house, flew out to Sacramento. So in other words, her entire family minus her sister and husband are now living with her with no definitive end. Her parents *claim* that they will be looking to buy their own home once their Little Rock home closes. And while I already got suspicious of her parents’ intention in coming out to settle in Sacramento before even seeing the house when she originally told me of this plan, once I walked into her house on Sunday night, I knew my suspicions were pretty solid: the dining area at the entrance was already set up with her mother’s Buddhist praying area and shrines. The walls on both floors were decorated as though it was a family home, with their individual graduation portraits, family and extended family photos. She even gave up the master bedroom with ensuite to her parents and took the smaller bedroom for herself next door! None of this was surprising to me.

At dinner this evening, I asked my friend about the setup, and she insisted it would be temporary and that things were fine now. But her body language said otherwise: her shoulders got higher up closer to her ears and she seemed tense. She also started speaking more slowly about it, as though she was trying to be very deliberate about each word she spoke regarding the matter.

I’ve always thought that her relationship with her family was a bit too suffocating and dysfunctional. And in return, she’s made a few jabs at me over the years for living across the country from my own parents, insinuating that I think about myself first before my family. But my main concern for her is that she will never fully have independence from them and live her own life. What would life be like if she ends up living with them forever, with her mom cooking for her until the day she dies and her dad sitting around, waiting to be catered to? How will she ever meet a potential life partner who would actually put up with this? We’re not in Vietnam; we’re living in a western country with western ways of living.

At the end of the day, we choose our life paths as individuals. We have our own values, our own beliefs about what is right and wrong, so I can’t really say much about her decisions. I just hope she actually gets to a place where she genuinely is happy and doesn’t feel a need to be so guarded about the way she speaks about her family or their relationship.

It doesn’t matter what time of year I come home or what the weather is like outside. I can always count on my parents’ house to be a complete ice box. It was pretty miserable and cold when we arrived yesterday afternoon, but if you can believe it or not, their house was even colder than it was outside. Chris remarked a number of times how cold he was. He would wake up extra early and take a hot shower just to warm his body up. There is zero insulation on the second floor, and while there is a relatively new and well functioning HVAC system, my parents rarely use it unless it’s during the dead of winter and they are desperate. I think the “natural state” of my parents’ house temperature is likely in the 50s. The concept of 68 degrees Fahrenheit being “room temperature” is completely absurd to my dad; he thinks that’s too hot. I still remember the annoying days shortly before Ed passed away when they would battle over the heat being on. All Ed would do is turn the heat on and set it to 68 degrees. Dad would get mad and turn it off. So it was a constant on-and-off fight all day and night long. I’m sure it’s also motivated by the fact that my dad doesn’t want to pay for heat because he’s cheap, but seriously: when you get to a certain age, don’t you just want to be… COMFORTABLE IN YOUR OWN HOME?!

So my mom has proceeded to fuss over whether I am warm enough, and now, when she fusses over whether I am warm enough or wearing enough layers, it’s also about whether “we” are warm enough — the baby and me. “Don’t let my baby get cold!” my mom would caution me, as she tried to cover up my belly with my long cardigan-coat that doesn’t have a zipper or buttons in the front. When we were eating dinner last night at the dining room table and I reached over to grab a plate, she raised her voice at me and said, “Don’t reach so far! That will hurt the baby!’ When I bent down later in the evening to grab a tupperware container from a low shelf, she yelled at me and told me that bending down isn’t good for the baby. “Do what I say! I know more about pregnancy than you do!”

She also believes in the old Chinese wives’ tale that when you are pregnant, you should eat one boiled egg and warm milk every day. If you do this, you will have a nice, healthy baby who will have rosy, chubby cheeks. She has proceeded to boil a number of eggs and set them aside for me in the morning. My aunt also told me the same thing: don’t forget to eat a boiled egg and milk every day until you give birth!

My dad has, oddly enough, gotten into hard seltzer. I don’t look at my dad as the kind of person who jumps on the band wagon when it comes to trends of any kind, so this was pretty amusing to me. He also rarely drinks any alcohol of any kind. He showed me the hard seltzer he got a case of in multiple flavors and said that after dinner if I wanted, I could have one. He rummages through a cupboard, stops, then hesitates and looks up. “Actually, maybe you shouldn’t have any alcohol now. No alcohol for you. You can have milk before bed.”

While my family drives me crazy, at their core, I know they love me very much and just have different ways of showing it. These are always the funny moments that make me realize their love.

After a very smooth flight from JFK to SFO today, we arrived about 40 minutes early at SFO into a newly built terminal, Harvey Milk Terminal 1. It felt pretty strange, as we normally arrive in Terminal 2, so when we landed, I almost felt like a foreigner going through this shiny but unrecognizable terminal. We arrived at my parents’ place a short while after that, leaving the sunny blue skies by the airport for the drab, grey, thick overcast of the Outer Richmond District of San Francisco. Yep, I had arrived home with a very cold welcome. Chris complained endlessly of the fog and dip in temperature.

As soon as I walked through the door, my dad greeted me. I attempted to hug him and was totally thwarted, as he backed away and awkwardly patted my shoulder. Thanks, Dad. Good to see you after over a year and a half, too. I also attempted to hug my mom, and she feebly just patted my back and asked if we had eaten on the plane. As per usual, the Asian parents’ love language is not through physical affection or said words, but through asking if your belly is full from nourishment.

My mom had already prepared baby clothes and diapers for us as gifts, and my dad bought two gallons of whole milk for our visit, even though I told him we’d only be at the house for a few days. My parents have stopped drinking dairy milk for a number of years already because cow milk has been giving my mom mucus, so she’s switched to almond or soy milk instead. But my dad is still okay having dairy, and he insisted that the baby and I need the fat from whole milk, which is why he got it. I was really touched by his concern and thought, but just thought, wow, that’s a LOT of milk to have just because I happen to be here!

My dad was unusually talkative while we sat and talked around the dining room table while my mom predictably was nervously rummaging through random things and fidgeting in the kitchen until I told her to stop and join us. I was happy to see that despite my dad’s usual negativity and complaints about rising costs of everything that he looked in pretty good health. He looked like he was about the same weight, and his skin tone looked good, plus his face had some good fat on his cheeks. My mom, on the other hand, always seems to look worse and worse when I come home. She looked even skinnier today than a year and a half ago, her hair even thinner, and her cheeks more sunken in. She told me that she’s physically gotten weaker over the last year and needs to rest more after cooking or cleaning and even walks, but her mental health just seems at its peak of nervousness, which obviously doesn’t do anything for her overall health. It also doesn’t help that she’s stopped caring about dressing herself well, so nothing fits her properly, which makes her look only more haggardly. I don’t know what I am going to do about my parents; it seems like nothing really helps them.