Disjointed family dinner

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Tonight, Chris and I went down to Chinatown for dinner to meet and eat with my cousins’ cousin, her husband, four kids, and friend, as well as my actual cousin and his wife, who have a dysfunctional relationship (and an even more dysfunctional one around their almost three-year-old son. My cousin’s cousin and her family are visiting New York from Montreal, and they reached out to us a few days ago to arrange a meal to see us. It’s actually pretty amusing (and dysfunctional to outsiders, I’m sure) that I won’t see my cousin and his wife in Brooklyn unless there is a visitor, or to celebrate one of their son’s birthdays. They have a marriage that no one would approve of in which they are constantly arguing and threatening to leave each other and take the kid with them, they can’t stand each others’ in-laws, and they don’t agree on anything regarding how to raise their son. So you can imagine why I want to be near that as little as possible.

I was actually looking forward to seeing our visiting cousin because from what I remember when I had last seen her four years ago at a wedding, she, unlike all of her siblings, has a personality and is fun to talk to. The funny thing about it is that I probably wanted to see her more than her own cousin did, and they’re technically the related ones, not me. My cousin made it clear he didn’t really want to be at the dinner and was just there out of obligation. He used his phone for a lot of the meal, barely said anything to the visiting cousin, and made little effort to talk to his wife’s sister, who also joined, or me or Chris. They also arrived late and left early because their son was at home with a fever, and of course, it’s a rush to get back to the child because who knows what could happen in the grandma’s care.

That’s what my family is — a lot of obligation and guilt and not a lot of actual desire to see each other. It’s sad, but it’s also comforting to know that those obligatory meetings don’t have to happen that often. And at least my cousin’s cousin is an interesting, seemingly normal person with a normal marriage and family life. Or maybe we can really just attribute that to their being Canadian and not American.

Mustard

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Chris just came back from his work trip to Cannes today, and unfortunately, it looks like the security at Heathrow en route back to New York caught him with the Dijon mustard he got for me that was over 100 ml. I was so bummed when I woke up this morning to see that text from him. No French mustard will be coming back to our apartment today.

I’ve been reading about brands like Maille and Amora mustard and how superior they are to the mustards here in the U.S. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really started developing a taste for mustard, especially the really spicy, complex ones, and the whole-grain, seedy ones (these require flossing after enjoying). These brands are just everyday brands in France, yet they make our everyday mustard brands look sad, pathetic and lacking real mustard flavor. They are supposed to be extremely strong to the point of clearing your blocked nose and also far spicier than the average mustards here.

It’s on my list of things to buy when we travel to France this October for Chris’s cousin’s wedding. When other people travel to Paris, they get excited for the fashion and make lists of clothing pieces or handbags they wish to purchase that would be cheaper in France than back home in the U.S. When I go to Paris, I start salivating over all things edible. Mmmmm, French mustard and butter and croissants and baguettes and macarons.

Wedding invitations

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Our wedding isn’t until next March, but because my future mother-in-law had the brilliant idea of getting wedding invitations printed in India during her trip there to save money, we decided to have her see what was available. After seeing the quality of the paper and the printing type availability, and particularly the low costs, it was too difficult to say no to it. We are literally paying about 10 percent or less of what we would have paid if we had our invitations made here by really any company, whether it was Wedding Paper Divas, Invitations by Dawn, or Minted, even after discount codes or using my cousin’s employee credit at Wedding Paper Divas!

I’m a little bit sad because I won’t have letterpress invitations like I had always dreamed of, but the reality hit me multiple times that pretty much no one would save those beautiful and extremely costly invitations other than my in-laws, my parents, my bridesmaids, and me. I can’t justify the cost for paper that will just be thrown away, even if they are my own cherished wedding invitations. People in general just don’t value these things the way I do. Maybe I can just have letterpress at my future child’s first birthday, or indulge myself in buying letterpress cards for myself to touch.

This is just further proof that the wedding industry is out to get everyone here and wants to rip us all off just for wanting to say “I do.” Well, take that, wedding industry, because “I don’t” to your overpriced American wedding invitations.

“So generous”

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My cousin’s cousin who lives in Montreal contacted me today and let me know that she and her family (she has four kids and a husband) are all coming down for vacation to New York beginning tomorrow through Sunday, and they’d like to see me and my cousin in Brooklyn for a meal. I was happy to hear from her even though she’s quite distant family, and I wasn’t able to see her when I was in Montreal last summer. I told my mom she was coming, and as is the typical way my mother reacts when she hears someone is in town, she starts freaking out immediately over the possibility that I could be paying for the dinner bill. How is it that this is the very first thing she has to comment on when I tell her my cousin’s cousin is in town?! She also made sure to ask why she was even coming to town. Well, this may be hard to believe, but they want to actually… vacation in New York City. Is that so shocking?

“I don’t know if you realize this, but you have a wedding coming up, and it’s going to be very expensive, so you shouldn’t be paying for her and her entire family to eat, especially if your cousin and his wife come,” my mom admonished me for the second time (yes, she called me a second time later this evening to tell me again, because clearly I wasn’t really listening the first time we spoke when I left work). “I know you. You’re always so generous. So generous. You always want to pay for everyone.” I do? I didn’t realize that…

“I’m not going to pay for everyone!” I tried to control the volume of my voice. “Stop acting crazy and worrying about something so dumb.”

I also didn’t realize I had a wedding coming up. That is mine. That I have to pay for. Well, that just completely slipped my mind.

So all those thoughts I had yesterday of missing my parents, well, those are gone now. Can you guess why?

 

The feeling of missing

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I’m going to admit this out loud: I actually miss my parents today. I saw them for five days in San Francisco and came back here, and well, they aren’t here. I go through a lot of complicated emotions when it comes to my parents. I love them dearly and know that they’ve done a lot for me to have the life I am so fortunate and privileged to have today. But I also grapple with the way they chose to treat Ed, in life and in death, and I struggle with the individuals that they are.

As loving and affectionate as my mother is, she can be extremely controlling and manipulative, much to the detriment of our relationship and the relationships she shares with everyone else, even including my dad. And as goofy and cute as my dad can be, he’s emotionally removed, childish and holds grudges like there’s no tomorrow, which drives me mad when I am with him for extended periods of time. I realized this past weekend that whenever I leave my dad now, I always hug him, and he actually hugs me back. And I realized that “now” means after Ed has passed. When Ed was still here, my dad never hugged me. The most he’d never do is pat me on the back when I tried to hug him. It’s a little different now, though, between us, I guess.

Sometimes, I wish I could see them more often, just in shorter bouts of time. I wish I could see them a little bit more than just two to four times a year when I fly home, usually for about a week and a half at a time. But then I remember how tense it can be when we’re together for too long, and I think that maybe we see each other just enough. I don’t know. Maybe I’m not sure what I want.

 

Super visits

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After Chris left for Cannes this afternoon (well, isn’t he all fancy for work), I took a long walk and came back to the apartment to find our bedroom AC unit leaking. The water got everywhere and destroyed a lot of accumulated theater tickets I had saved in a box for scrapbooking purposes. Needless to say, I was not happy about this and was frustrated I had to do extra cleaning on what was supposed to be a quiet, relaxing afternoon.

Our super came to inspect the AC unit and said that he would need to remove it to fully examine it tomorrow. He’s always been so quick to respond to all of our requests and so friendly, so I decided to give him most of our leftover baklava that a friend had brought over the night before for our dinner party at home. He was so excited — I’d never seen his face light up like that before. I warned him that it had pistachios just in case anyone in his family had a nut allergy, and he said they loved nuts, and it wouldn’t be a problem.

Supers do a lot of hard, dirty work, literally, for our apartments. I wonder how often anyone gives him anything nice or edible in the time he’s worked in this building. Maybe I should feed him more often when I see him so that he knows we are grateful for his work.

 

Mom’s complaints are love

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My mom is always touched when I make her food even though she tends to complain about it. She tells me that she didn’t raise me to cook food and “do manual labor.” To her, it’s like a low class job or activity even though she grew up extremely poor in a rural part of central Vietnam. She says cooking is hard work and that I should just “lie down and relax” when I’m not at work. This is slightly comical to me, though. If I work a 40-hour work week, she’s essentially telling me that she wants me to “lie down” 128 hours. That would get really boring, wouldn’t it?

Before I left home, I humored her and made her beloved and requested boxed brownie mixes. She doesn’t like baking since she really hates measuring anything when making food, so when it comes to even boxed mixes, she’d prefer someone else do it despite how simple it is. She knows how much I can’t stand mixes (I prefer to bake from scratch, which to this day, still befuddles her to no end), so she’s fully aware that I do this only because I love her and nothing else.

I talked to her on the phone today, and she thanks me profusely for making “such delicious brownies – so chewy!” Mom, I said, it was from a box! “I don’t care — it still tastes good, and you know I love it!” She exclaims in response. That’s what moms do. They complain about the things you do even though they absolutely love it at the same time and then go and tell all their friends about it.

 

Morning cab ride

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I took a red eye flight back to New York and arrived just past 7am this morning. I was bleary eyed, even after sleeping flat in business class for just over four hours. Four hours is not enough sleep for anyone. Who knew that I’d then be having a discussion on racism and gun control with my cab driver.

When I got into my cab to head back to the apartment, I made eye contact with my cab driver and realized he was not the usual Indian or Bangladeshi driver. After some small talk, I found out that he is actually Tibetan and had been living in this country for just over 15 years. He said he’s been married almost 15 years and wants to either go back to Southern India where there’s a large Tibetan community, or Tibet, where he’s from and where his family still lives. “I don’t feel safe in this country as a man,” he said, briefly mentioning the Charleston church shooting that has been all over the news in the last couple of days. “I don’t feel comfortable raising children here, especially boys. How can I feel comfortable knowing any random person can just get a gun, shoot, and kill me and my future son here?”

I felt so hurt hearing this. I realize that what he says sounds a bit paranoid, but given recent events, is it really that far fetched? Society is supposed to progress and get better as time goes on in an ideal world, and it seems like racism continues to persist. America, the land of plenty and opportunity, is disappointing immigrants and locals alike. What we praise as a melting pot that embraces all cultures, at this moment in time, just feels like a big sham, like a facade that we have to hold up to try to brag to the rest of the world that we’re the best (even when we clearly are not), to entice people to come into our country, and then be bombarded by arduous, senseless visa and immigration issues, a lack of gun control, and perpetual white supremacy that says that as long as you are not a white person in our society, you will never attain success as easily. You’ll always be seen as a black person or a Tibetan person or a yellow person. That’s what you are first and foremost.

I watched Jon Stewart’s clip on the Charleston shootings, and it resonated with me because that’s exactly how I feel. We will look at this incident of church goers being shot and killed during prayer as a tragedy, as a hate crime, but zilch will come of it because of politics, as Obama says. Nothing will change — at least, not in the near future. You and I may want change, but we have lots of neighbors who refuse to admit that guns are a problem here, that racism still persists, and turn a blind eye to all these deaths as long as their own loved ones are untouched by these terrors.

As a country, we’re so f*cked up.

Pork roll “bomb”

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Asian mothers are an interesting segment of Western society. While everyone is of course unique in her own way, the one thing that seems to unify all first-generation Asian mothers is that they all want to show their love for their children via food… LOTS of food. All the time. In every possible way and every possible minute. I recently learned of Chris’s friend’s mom, who is Cambodian, and how she loves to pack her daughters edible things that she claims they cannot get wherever they are, even if they are in major metropolitan areas with a plethora of very specific Asian groceries. The most ridiculous incident that I could not stop laughing about was when she packed an actual raw chicken on her flight from Melbourne up to Brisbane, claiming that the chicken in Brisbane would never be as good as the chicken in Melbourne. This got posted on Facebook. I saw it through Chris, and I thought, well, my mom’s pretty crazy about packing me food, but it’s never crossed that line.

My mom loves to marvel (and at times exaggerate) over how expensive food and groceries are in New York City vs. San Francisco. She clearly takes a lot of joy in telling me that she has to pack me everything from apricots and papayas to even freaking imported mochi and seaweed because, “It won’t be as good in New York as here.” Sometimes, what she says is true in this regard, but in most cases, it is not. But I love her for her effort anyway.

This time, she made sure to pack me a loaf of cha lua, also known as a Vietnamese pork roll, because she knows how much I love it and how rarely I get to eat it in New York, since the closest Vietnamese bakery I trust to buy it from is about 15 blocks outside of Brooklyn Chinatown, which I only get to at most twice a year. In addition to that, she packed me lots of other edibles. I always feel like I should resist given it’s always a lot of stuff and she probably spent too much time buying it all, but I see how much joy she takes in lining up all these things by my luggage on the day I leave that I feel like I will crush her soul if I say no. So I usually accept about 99 percent of it.

And this time, that beloved cha lua pork roll got scanned in the TSA pre-line security check multiple times and then swabbed because they probably thought it was a bomb or explosive. The TSA inspector kept looking at it, all neatly wrapped up in foil, with a puzzled look on his face, finally relented, and put it back in my backpack and handed me my bag.

I love my mom. I also love how ridiculous these airport security check machines are in scanning excessive food packed by Asian moms and mistaking them for explosives.

Dinner with the cousins

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Last night after my meeting in Menlo Park, I went to Palo Alto to meet my cousin and his wife for dinner. It was a pleasant evening of drinking, eating very tasty Burmese food, and talking about a lot of light-hearted things. There was no real bonding in the sense of emotionally connecting or finding out the depths of each other’s minds, but it was still enjoyable.

Over the last seven or eight years, I’ve really struggled to maintain a close relationship with my cousins. Maybe it’s just a part of becoming more mature, more of the person I want to be in terms of values and goals, and realizing how much that clashes with them. I suppose it’s a similar struggle we face with friends as we grow older, but friends can easily drift and never see each other again and just each others’ Facebook posts. With cousins, they are bonded to you by blood, so it’s inevitable that even if you don’t want to, that you will need to see them again in some capacity.

Maybe my struggle with them is partly my own fault. It’s because I want them to be something to me that they cannot be because they just don’t have the ability. I always have an ideal of what a friend should be, what a spouse should be, what a mom or dad or cousin should be, and when they don’t meet that ideal, I feel disappointed and oftentimes angered by it. Why can’t we understand each other? It has to be because they aren’t trying hard enough, no? Why can’t you see why X event or action would make me angry? I don’t think it’s due to a lack of caring but rather due to a lack of ability. None of us is perfect. And we all have such different views shaped by our different experiences. Just like one friend will never be able to satisfy all my needs of a friend, my cousins will never be able to fulfill what I wish they could be to me as my cousins. Perhaps with some it’s due to a lack of caring. But with this cousin, I don’t think that’s the case. I just need to see and accept him as he is and stop questioning why he can’t be more than that. Sometimes, you just want the company of someone familiar who you’ve known for 29-plus years, and things can be good — not amazing, but still good. And maybe that can be enough if I just let it be enough.