Durian

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Whenever I come home, my mom, like most moms, wants to make sure I get to eat all the things I like to eat, whether that’s food that’s homemade or store-bought. One of the things she decided to get me this time around was a big whole durian. I actually didn’t grow up eating durian and only got introduced to it as an adult. After having a literally rotten durian experience in Cambodia four years ago, I always feel a bit wary trying the fruit now. But if there’s one thing I can trust my mom to do, it’s to know when durian is good. This afternoon, she showed me how to cut it open in the most optimal way and slice out all the big pockets of durian meat. I was so intrigued by it because I’d never seen anyone do this before, so I even recorded her cutting up part of it. I helped cut part of it, but mid-way through, my mom got slightly possessive, and she insisted she cut up the rest of it. It’s an extremely prickly thus painful fruit to hold, so you have to hold a towel between you and the fruit when gripping it to cut it. This is my mom’s labor of love.

While eating the fresh durian with vanilla ice cream tonight, Chris and I looked up all the nutrition facts about this fruit. While we initially scared my dad by telling him that durian is the one fruit that actually has dietary cholesterol content, he was pleasantly surprised to learn that this “king of fruit” is very high in fiber, potassium, vitamin C, manganese, thiamin, riboflavin, folate, copper, and magnesium. I suppose the high caloric content of durian is now worth it. 🙂

“Hiking” with family

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The hiking day in Marin kind of turned out the way I expected it, meaning it pretty much got derailed. On our first trail along the Tomales Bay trail in Point Reyes National Seashore, it was quite foggy and cool, meaning that the beautiful seashore I was hoping to see was barely visible from our trail. We did, however, see deer and mule elk, and just smidgens of the ocean. It honestly wasn’t enough to make that trail worth it, though, and I certainly got that message loud and clear when about a third of the way, both my parents insisted they were too tired to continue. They complained and said the dirt path wasn’t good (even though it was extremely flat along 95 percent of it), and my mom complained that she almost fell. We probably made it about 70 percent of the trail before we decided to turn back. I really did not want to elicit the wrath of either parent on the ride to Mount Tamalpais or back into the city in the evening.

But then what really made the trip frustrating was when the gas tank of my dad’s car was about half full, and he said he needed to fill up. It was like my mom’s paranoia radar went off, and she continued to obsess over the gas and running out for the long, windy ride along Highway 1 to the gas station, and finally to the East Peak of Mount Tamalpais. We had no gas problem, but my parents made it into a needless problem to create a problem on this day trip. We took the short cut route by parking in a lot that was 0.3 miles away from the East Peak summit, and about 0.1 miles into it, my parents turned back and said they couldn’t do it anymore. On their way down, my dad loudly complained that he’s just not used to this type of activity. I could hear the complaining on my way up. When Chris and I reached the bottom and we were driving back to San Francisco, my mom insisted that they’re not as young as us, and they cannot go as far and as long. And I said to her, there are people in their 80s who are on this super short trail and they did it just fine. You can do it, too! It’s a useless argument because my mom loves to use the excuse that she’s old, therefore she cannot <fill in the blank>. She is technically 62 years old, and definitely able to walk up a bunch of wooden stairs that she refused to go up.

I would love it if my parents had a grab-life-by-the-balls attitude, if they took life as it came and didn’t complain endlessly about everything that either happened or has the potential to happen (the latter is real in my parents’ house). Why are we doing this hiking? my mom said. Because I want us to do an activity together and so we can see some good views! I respond. That was a bad response on my part, though, because my parents don’t really care much about views, and the only activity we successfully do together is eat.

Chris noticed that on the way back to the car along the trailhead, my mom was walking about twice as fast as she walked when we first started. This is how we know my mom is 120 percent capable, but she just wants to be perceived as not because she doesn’t like going outside and walking on anything that is not paved cement.

Not in that chair

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It doesn’t seem to matter how much times passes. Every time I open the door into my parents’ house, the part of my brain that apparently doesn’t register reality thinks that Ed is going to be sitting in his chair at his desk in our living room. That part of my mind thinks he will swivel his chair, turn around and see me, and then hurriedly get up to hug me and help me with my luggage. I thought this when I arrived home from the hotel this morning, turned the key, and opened the door to let myself in. He isn’t there, I saw, and a part of my  stomach just fell.

It’s not that I wanted him to be at home forever, living in this house with our parents and doing all his same usual things. But this is how I remember him. In an ideal world, he would have gotten a decent paying job and moved out years ago. In that world, when I’d come back from New York to visit, he actually would not be sitting in that chair when I would open the front door. Instead, he’d come home to see me, or I’d go to his apartment, or we’d all meet at a restaurant and reunite. So many options had the potential to exist for my brother. It just makes me sick to think that all those potential realities are now dead along with him.

A talk about nothing

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Tonight, I went to dinner with Chris, my two good friends, and their husband and boyfriend. We spent almost two hours chatting about a lot of random things, but really, it wasn’t like there was anything very substantial or serious we discussed. It was a really long talk with all sorts of tangents about seemingly nothing, yet the entire time, I was enjoying myself and the company of my friends. A talk about absolutely nothing was entirely satisfying to me, and the laughter that came out of it was genuine. And when it ended, I knew this experience would not happen again until the next time I’d come visit home, and it made me feel a little sad on the walk back to the hotel from South of Market. It made me realize that I really do miss having a friend group like this back in New York. I have individual friends I can catch up with there, but I don’t have the same dynamic with them the way I do with these two friends. We can’t really talk about nothing and have that be satisfying or sufficient for me. And then I thought, why is it that I haven’t made friends like that in my entire eight years in New York City? I guess I married my best friend (not that that’s a bad thing, of course). I guess I go through these same thoughts every few months, but it still makes me wistful. I could potentially leave New York City without a real friend group developed at all.

Or maybe the problem is really me. You can’t really expect to have the same dynamic with friends you just met as with the friends you’ve had for two decades, right? Maybe my expectation is too high. But can’t a satisfying talk about nothing occur between two strangers as easily as it can with two friends who’ve known each other for years?

Old friends, old feelings

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It’s funny how when you are physically distant from friends, you can feel emotionally distant, but when you are put together in the same space once again, everything feels normal and like you get each other again. Over the years given that I’ve been away from home for 12 years now, I’ve gone through fluctuations in feelings regarding how “close” I feel with a number of my friends, but I know deep down that when we’re together, everything feels comfortable and good again. Maybe that’s the test of real friendship that can withstand time and distance, that the feeling you have when you are reunited is the familiar warm, happy feeling you had when your friendship was seemingly at its best and shiniest.

It’s comforting to return home and know that I will have familiar faces of friends and hear similar laughter each time I come back. It helps me think of home as a potentially happy place versus a place that harbors a lot of negativity and impending arguments and explosions.

Bad service

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It’s very rare that I have bad service at restaurants. But the sad part is that when I do have bad service, most of the time, I tend to be with my girlfriends. Why would this be the case? Is it because restaurants don’t take young women dining together seriously? They think that couples dining together are preferable as diners at their restaurant, which is why when Chris and I go out together, we rarely get poor service? My friends and I were at The Progress in San Francisco last night, and not only were we seated in this terrible alcove area at the front of the restaurant by the bar where we couldn’t even share a full table (my second friend had her own half table in our dumb alcove), but our server was constantly asking us if we were ready to order when it was clear we were not. We were being rushed to order everything from drinks to mains to dessert. The rush was very obvious, and the snobbery of our server was undeniable. He really just couldn’t wait to get us our bill and get us out of the restaurant.

To get back at him, we tipped him only 12 percent. He was a jerk, and while he may just stereotype us as being cheap Asians for not giving him at least 15 percent (really, 18 to 20 percent seems like the expectation nowadays as annoying as it is), what he really should know is that he was unnecessarily snooty and did not exhibit a good server attitude. The food was good, but fairly overpriced as most new restaurants in San Francisco are now, and not good enough to warrant even considering a second visit. We won’t be back there.

Embarrassment

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I think everyone, once we become adults, has at some point felt embarrassed publicly by their parents. It’s inevitable, right, that they will do something, anything, that will annoy you and make you feel awkward to be seen with them in public. Well for me, that happens almost any time I’m in a place with my parents where something is “all you can eat” or “all you can grab,” and they make sure to take advantage of that to no end.

Yesterday, I took them to the hotel lounge at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, where Chris and I will be staying this week, and they were wide-eyed when they saw all the snacks, full dinner spread, and fresh cut up fruit neatly laid out for guests to take. Needless to say, they wanted to take advantage of it, even if that meant stuffing a few bags of potato chips and a handful of apples into my mom’s reusable shopping bag. My dad took the liberty of filling a plate of food with pork loin, Israeli couscous, and sautéed spinach, and eating it, even though we had dinner plans at a Vietnamese restaurant just an hour later with Chris. “Why are we going out to eat if there’s free food to eat here?” my dad mumbled between bites.

I feel bad about my embarrassment. Really, I do. I was reminded countless times growing up (and still occasionally, now) that my dad grew up in a Chinatown ghetto with barely enough food to eat, which meant he oftentimes ate leftover spoiled food and got sick. My mom grew up in rural, poor central Vietnam with mostly rice and only rice to eat — not many vegetables, and meat was a luxury item rarely seen or even smelled. I’ve never had to worry about having enough food to eat, or a variety of dishes to eat, and now, I get to stay at hotels where the food and variety overfloweth, and my parents only get to experience this when they’re with Chris and me. I get why they would want to take as much as they’d like. To them, the world could end any second, all their life savings could diminish tomorrow (that’s what happens when you don’t trust the world at all), and so they want to take as much as they can and save everything “just in case.” Granted, my parents are financially comfortable enough to travel at their leisure; they just have zero desire to do so and find travel and enjoying life’s pleasures wasteful. They live like paupers, and when they see a lot to take, they will take as much as they can get.

My mom is aware of my feelings of embarrassment. That’s why she scolded my dad when he suggested getting a few more bags of potato chips. I overheard her say, “Don’t do that. Yvonne doesn’t like it.” I feel conflicted about it, but I guess this is probably what will happen with every subsequent generation to some degree. Maybe we’ll just never understand each other, or worse, maybe they’ll never really know me the way I wish they could. I just don’t think they have the capacity to know me and what I’m really about.

And that makes me sad because then I think: what if my future kids end up feeling the exact same way about me? 

Loaf on a plane

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I had left over sour cream from muffins I made a couple weeks ago, so I decided to use it up by making my favorite banana bread recipe from Boston’s Flour Bakery today. Chris asked me why I was baking the day before we’ll be away in San Francisco for a week and a half, and I said we’d just bring the loaf to my parents. He seemed displeased. He loves banana bread. “They’re not going to appreciate it, anyway,” he muttered.

He’s not all wrong in saying that. My dad’s been trying to pretend he’s super healthy since his heart surgery a year and a half ago by publicly fussing over foods like red meat and pastries. Last January when I came home, I bought scones from the Irish bakery down the block in our neighborhood, and he got mad and refused to eat them, saying they were bad for his health. Instead of eating a pastry or eggs in the morning like he might occasionally do, he’s been mixing about five different types of seed, oat bran, flax, and who knows what else, along with a heaping teaspoon of turmeric into his oatmeal. This is every single day. It looks just like vomit. Yes, I told him this.

What I want to know is – if we are all striving to have a long, healthy life, isn’t part of that life being healthy, as in, not just my heart and brain are functioning properly, but my mind is healthy and happy? Otherwise, what are we living a long life for? What are we waiting for?

“Home”

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“Have so much fun at home!” a few of my colleagues exclaimed as I was heading out on Friday. “It will be so nice for you to spend time with your parents and family!”

Home means different things to different people. Oftentimes when you tell others you are going home, it conjures up the idea of going back to the familiar, to the house or neighborhood in which you were raised in all of its relative sheltered glory. It can mean getting pampered by your parents with all of your favorite home-cooked meals, getting your mom to do your laundry for you since you’re a “special” temporary guest at the house for a finite period of time, and having whatever errands you don’t like doing done for you by your parents or siblings. It means seeing all your family and friends you grew up with again.

Usually, these feelings that “home” conjures up are happy. Colleagues think it must be happy. Friends from where you currently live think it must be relaxing for you. Well, “happy” or “relaxing” are not necessarily the first words that come to mind when I think of going back home. In fact, better adjectives to describe my feelings about going home include “conflicted,” “stressed,” “anxious,” and “torn.”

I love San Francisco. I love it even with how increasingly expensive it is becoming, despite the increasing homelessness problem that the city refuses to acknowledge or take care of, despite that neighborhoods I used to walk through look completely different today than what they were twenty years ago. What I do not love are all the unnecessary and completely made up conflicts of my family, immediate and not immediate, the senseless arguments I know will happen within days of arriving because of my mother’s twisted, negative way of looking at the world and assuming everyone is out to get her (and me, for that matter), and the awareness that every single time I go home, I know I will never see my brother again. It is a constant and inevitable reminder that he is dead, gone from this world by his own hand, and likely to get the hell away from all the undeserved, incessant criticism and torture he endured in that house on the hill we grew up in. Every moment I am there, I feel like I am waiting to get accused of doing something wrong or not doing something I should have done, or getting criticized for something about Chris or his family or both. I try to deal with it for a few blows by not saying anything, by being silent, but I’m not weak, so I cannot just sit there and take it. So of course inevitably, I will yell back and let her know I’m not going to take her made up lies and perceived hate.  I know most people say that all other (Asian) parents are kind of like this. After speaking with different families and therapists for most of my life, I know that what I face, and what my brother used to face, is quite a bit different.

What is scary, though, is that oftentimes when kids feel this way about their parents, their parents have no clue they have these feelings. Mine are included here. They think we must be excited to come home. They’re temporarily excited to have us home for the first few days. They don’t have the awareness that their excitement is temporary, though. They cannot imagine why we would not want to visit. I mean, they raised us and brought us into this world, right? We owe them. How could we not want to visit? That’s… being ungrateful. The least we could do is visit, especially since in my case, we’re not… supporting them. Maybe it’s the immigrant Asian thing. Immigrant Asians think they gave their kids a “better life” by immigrating to a Western country with supposedly better opportunities and privileges. Because they made these sacrifices, they think their kids owe them. I’ve had to think about this almost my whole life, and I still cannot quite wrap my head around these two generations reconciling this conflict fully. It doesn’t seem like it has a resolution. It’s one of those things that just goes with you to the grave.

So, all of the above is why the concept of “home” is so conflicting for me. It’s why when other colleagues who live away from home tell me they are going home, I don’t immediately make comments like, “That’s so great!” or “That’s so exciting!” or “It will be so relaxing for you!” I don’t really mind hearing comments like this directed to me because they’re just generic, and I don’t expect everyone to be aware of my dysfunctional home, nor do I expect others to be sensitive to the fact that “home” is not a happy place for everyone. When others tell me they are going home, I usually respond with a comment like, “Are you looking forward to it?” Funnily enough, a lot of times, I don’t get a positive response to that.

There are more unhappy families out there than people realize. Or, maybe people just want to live in their tiny ignorant bubbles and believe that most families are happy and seemingly functional.

37th

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Dear Ed,

Today marks 37 years since you were brought into this world. Happy birthday to my loving, generous, warm-hearted brother, the one who left this life too soon, too quickly. It’s the third birthday of yours that you’ve missed because your life was cut short. This world can be such a painful place to be some days. Today is one of those days for me.

You know what it is kind of funny, but not funny in the literal sense? People think that the anniversary of your death or your birthday every year are my worst days. Those days serve as terrible reminders of the loss, but I think we all know that people who have loved and lost too soon, we think of those we lost every single day. A day never goes by when we don’t think about you or miss you. It’s just a fact. Some people say it gets easier over time. My sadness and anger over your premature death haven’t subsided, though. I still have so many conflicts over your life and how you were treated by everyone from your church ‘friends’ to our relatives to even our own parents. I am haunted in dreams by them because I don’t think those feelings will ever go away. In these nightmares, I am always yelling at our parents and expressing anger over how unfairly they treated you, how they ignored your illness and struggles, and even how they ignored your birthdays when you were alive and overall human feelings. No one really understands this, and most people, even my seemingly closest friends, don’t want to know all these truths. Your life is an enigma to them. It’s not an enigma to me, though.

I’m still struggling to have faith in the world and hope for the future. Every day is a struggle against cynicism for me, before your death, and even more so since your death. I try to be strong every day, but some days, the struggle is harder than others. Some days, I have little motivation to do more with my life. But then I think of you, and I think that I can’t fail your memory. It’s an ongoing thought that sits on my head throughout all my days.

To honor your birthday, Chris had kouign amann delivered to my office today. I know you never got a chance to try these when you were here, but they are a pastry from the Brittany region of France that are like the crispier, sweeter, and slightly denser version of a croissant. They were really tasty. I know you would have really liked them. You probably would have eaten all four in a single sitting if no one stopped you. There’s so much you never got a chance to eat when you were here — here in New York, back in San Francisco, and all around the world.

We went back to Elmhurst and had knife-cut noodles, dumplings, and cumin lamb in your memory tonight. It made me remember how I never got a chance to take you to my favorite hand-pulled noodle place in Elmhurst, and I didn’t even take you to have New York pizza when you were visiting New York in 2011. It was just too dramatic that time because of our mother constantly picking fights with me that trip. They really ruined that trip for you. I’m sorry. I was in survival mode at that point. But at least I took you to the original Shake Shack when you were here?

The world is dim today for me as I look through our childhood photos together and realize that we’ll never take another photo together ever again. As adults, we really didn’t take enough photos together. I really regret that. We didn’t celebrate or memorialize our everyday moments together, even after I got my iPhone. The worst thing is that I thought about taking more photos together in March 2013, but again, our mother was in such a sour mood for the two weeks I was back in San Francisco that year that the idea of taking a photo altogether really irritated me. That was the last time I saw you alive.

What are you doing today, anyway? Are you looking down at the earth, wondering what the future is going to be like after the presidential election has ended, wondering when I’m going to produce your future niece and nephew? Do you ever think, I wonder what life would have been like if I just moved out of that terrible house and struck it out on my own?  Well, I wonder that. I think you’d still be here today. But those are useless thoughts.

I don’t know when I’m going to see you again. When are you going to come back? I really miss you. Visiting your niche in San Francisco isn’t enough, especially since every time I go, I have to go with our parents. Do you ever miss them?

Life is going by really quickly. We’re already five months past our wedding that you were watching from above. The worst thing is that while life passes by quickly, the slowest moments are when I am thinking about you and how I’ll never see you again. That’s when life really, really sucks.

It’s okay, Ed. I’ll be okay without you. I think I’ve been doing decently well since you’ve left us. The rest of the world may not acknowledge you on your birthday, but I do. I acknowledge you every day in my heart and in my mind. I don’t really care if other people think it’s obsessive on Facebook or in person. They can continue living their miserable lives. You never forget the people you love most, regardless of whether they are still living or have passed on.

Fundraising time is about to begin. I’ll be thinking of you and our happy memories together, and hoping that your life now is far more peace-filled than it was on this earth. I love you.

With love and longing,

your little sister Yvonne