The Fare to Yangshuo
New York Times Magazine
The taxi driver’s face brightened up when my husband and I arrived at the dingy Guilin airport in southern China on the last flight in from Shanghai. We were exhausted from traveling by plane and train every couple of days. The drive to Yangshuo, where the mountain peaks are shaped like gumdrops, would take an hour and a half.
“You’re Chinese,” she said. She was short and wore baggy clothes. “You speak Chinese?”
“Yi dian,” I said. One drop. A little. After traveling in China for more than a week, my language skills had improved somewhat. I could make small talk, though I would struggle in an argument. But yi dian was invitation enough for the cabby to start chatting. Read more >>
Forget Perfection. Embrace Mamahuhu.
New York Times Magazine
As a kid, I spoke English to my Chinese immigrant parents, who replied to me and my siblings mostly in kind. My grandmother, who lived with us, was different. She could communicate to us only in Mandarin; what we couldn’t understand in words, we’d figure out through pantomime. A few phrases in Mandarin are particularly vivid to me — the ones my parents used when they grumbled about something: hulihutu, or “muddle-headed”; fa feng, or “to go crazy”; and most striking of all, mamahuhu, which means “so-so” or “mediocre” (and also “careless”).
In Mandarin, ma means horse and hu means tiger; the idiom mamahuhu literally translates, then, as “horse horse tiger tiger.” In one of the fables that explains its origins, a slapdash artist paints a tiger’s head but changes his mind midway and completes the creature with a horse’s body. (Etymologically, it most likely began as a colloquialism borrowed from Manchu culture during the Qing dynasty.) According to Chairman Mao’s personal physician, in 1956 the revered leader met an elderly woman living in a dilapidated shack on an island in the Xiang River. When he asked about her quality of life, instead of proclaiming that the revolution had liberated her, she defiantly muttered, “Mamahuhu.” She hadn’t experienced the prosperity that Mao promised.
Mamahuhu became a family in-joke for me and my siblings. At first we found the concept funny — and the sound of it, too. Sometimes my brother and I chanted the string of vowels, hooting the “hu” like owls — bewildering our parents — before dissolving into laughter. But as we grew older, we realized mamahuhu also described our family. Read more>>
The Complexity in ‘Where Are You From?’
New York Times
When I asked my father where he was born, I never got a straight answer. Wuhan, he’d say. In other moments, he’d claim Wuchang.
I didn’t understand why he couldn’t state a simple fact. My assumption reflected my privilege, that of a girl who’d known only the peace and stability of the suburbs east of San Francisco. Much later, I would realize that his birthplace had been absorbed into Wuhan, a provincial capital formed from the sprawl of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang.
My father is gone now, but I’ve wondered what he would make of the coronavirus. He surely would have worried about his family more than himself.
It would have pained him that relations have cratered between his ancestral and adopted homelands, causing a backlash against Asian-Americans. “Go back to where you came from!” we’re told. Read more >>
Letter of Recommendation: The Ear Spoon
New York Times
When I was growing up in the suburbs east of San Francisco, our teachers used to say, “Don’t put anything in your ear except for your elbow.” No matter how much our ears itched, we were told, we shouldn’t poke in a pen cap, the pink eraser on a No. 2 pencil or a cotton swab; doing so risked puncturing our eardrums.
True enough — and yet what our teachers said didn’t reflect the practices of my Chinese grandmother, who had immigrated to the United States and moved into our house to help care for me and my siblings while my parents worked. Waipo, as we called her, would cozily tuck our heads into her capacious lap to clean our ears. Her grooming introduced me to the ear spoon — a long-handled curette, also known as an ear pick, ear picker or ear scoop, that is a common implement in Asian households.
Traditional ear spoons can be made of silver, brass, plastic, bamboo or another smooth, sturdy material; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco owns an ornate jade hair ornament from the Qing dynasty that doubles as an ear spoon. I don’t recall what Waipo’s looked like, only that sitting in her bedroom — where I remember the glow of the lamp, with the crinkly clear plastic left on the shade, and her bottle of Oil of Olay on the dresser — she made us feel cherished. Read More>>>
The Great American Family Car Ride
In the early 1980s, whenever we piled into the family sedan, my siblings and I would jostle one another for space in the back seat. If one of us extended a millimeter of thigh or shoulder beyond our allotment, accusations would fly.
Once, to escape, I climbed onto the ledge above the back seat. I pressed my fingers against the cool glass of the rear window and watched the highway spool away. Tucked into this cozy compartment, I was blissfully unaware that, in a collision, I could have gone flying through the entire car and into the windshield.
My parents must have reasoned that I was safe back there, with my father at the helm. Before you rush to judgment, let’s remember those were laissez-faire days. Wearing seatbelts in California wasn’t required until 1986, and airbags weren’t federally mandated until 1998.
At the time, hardly anyone was strapped into the back seat, which is why we could treat it like a jungle gym. Still, anyone driving past would have been astonished to spot me on the ledge so close to the rear window. Read more>>
The Champagne Toast
The New York Times
When my father ordered champagne, it baffled my boyfriend, but not me.
We’d been dating for about six months, and my parents were meeting him for the first time in 2001 at brunch at a French brasserie in San Francisco. It was the first time they’d ever met any of my boyfriends.
My immigrant Chinese parents had long made it clear that they weren’t interested in hearing about my dating life. They weren’t going to confront the possibility of my romances — which they considered a distraction from school and work — unless they thought I was on the verge of getting engaged. Read more>>>
For My Father, Resurrecting the Ancient Rituals
New York Times
Even after the Parkinson’s diagnosis, my father seemed invincible. When a truck sideswiped his car, flipping it over, he hung upside down by his seat belt, his glasses on and intact. He’d taken a taxi home from the hospital, rather than calling my mother for a ride and upsetting her. And he’d survived falls, cracked one kneecap, and then the other, bruised his face, and healed each time. Iron bones, to match an iron will. Read More>>
Happily Ever After?
The dining room reeked of dead flowers, of pond scum and festering. A few weeks after my father’s funeral, I’d returned to my childhood home and discovered withered petals heaped around floral arrangements, their stems gray with mold, in vases long gone dry.
Gagging, I shoved it all into the green waste bin. Our family had held off from cleaning up, not certain if my mother was ready. As I slammed down the lid, I thought about the help she would need, not only in her mourning but in the life she would make without my father.
Who would move the heavy bins down the steep driveway to the curb each week? Who would keep the house from feeling too empty? Independent as my mother was—she was a research scientist who still headed her own lab—who would watch out for her? Read More>>
One Wish: A Novel? A Baby? A Father's Life?
LitHub
After drying out on the kitchen counter, the wishbone no longer looked like it had originated inside a rotisserie chicken. Dun and brittle, it resembled a desiccated twig, ready to combust.
My husband and I each grabbed onto an end. We both knew that I was cheating. My fingers were high up on the prong, so that I could break off the longer half and get my wish. In that split second before it cracked apart, before I raised my end high in the air, time stopped. Which wish?Read more>>
Love, Translated
Southwest: The Magazine
The grammar lesson outed my secret.
In Spanish class, we were practicing time expressions. “How long ago did you run?” the teacher asked.
Hace una semana, a classmate answered. One week ago.
“How long ago did you swim?
Hace un año, another said. One year ago.
I nervously studied the list of verbs in the workbook. Besar. To kiss. Read More>>
For Daughter of Immigrants, American Soil Offers Plenty to Forage
As my family tromped through the hills east of Berkeley, green with abundance, I spotted the disk of a leaf, perched on a slender stem, delicate as a lady’s parasol: miner’s lettuce?
I texted a photo to a naturalist friend to confirm my find. The excitement I felt at the confirmation might have rivaled James Marshall’s when he discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill on the American River in 1849. Eureka! Lore has it that gold rush prospectors dined on the greens, high in vitamin C, to prevent scurvy, I told my eight-year-old twin boys.
It was early April, a few weeks after the world went into retreat. I’d been foggy-headed, sleepless with worry about the coronavirus and the economy, but giving this impromptu science and history lesson fired my synapses. Foraging felt like empowerment and self-sufficiency — a form of resourceful thrift familiar to me as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and a small measure of control when so much has felt out of control.
An Ever-Expanding Universe for My Twins
New York Times
Up until a week before I gave birth to my twin boys, I swam every day. My belly ballooned between the halves of my sports bikini, and the swimmers in the other lanes must have feared that they were going to witness a water birth. I felt weightless and free. The scent of chlorine was bracing yet purifying, and the air bubbles trailed behind me like comets.
I pictured the twins, floating in me as I was floating in the pool. Their eyes closed, their fists clenched, on the verge of unfurling. Did the rocking motion put them to sleep? I hoped that the twins would someday take to the water as easily as I did. >>Read More
The Stories Beyond the Songs
The Curran SF
My immigrant Chinese father loved musicals: the soaring songs, the graceful dancers, the worlds within them lit gold. With their hero’s journeys and reversals of fortune, their extravagant declarations of bravery and love, musicals captured the promise and perils of coming to America, even if their stories were set elsewhere—in the imperial court of Siam, say, or a Russian shetl, or an island in the South Pacific.
In the early 1960s, when my parents arrived in the Midwest to attend graduate school, they quickly became acquainted with other all-American pleasures, too: big cars, hamburgers, root beer floats. During my childhood in the Bay Area, back in the days before DVRs and VCRs, when one network or another would air The Sound of Music—uninterrupted, with no commercials, as a special event—our whole family would gather to watch Maria and the von Trapps outwit the Nazis and escape across the Austrian Alps. I’d sit on the carpet, thrilled to be awake past my bedtime, peering through this window onto a wider world, swept up by music that made me feel like a soap bubble floating on the wind.
How to Pick Up Anything
Zora Magazine
My father handed me a folded slip of red paper. Printed inside were the instructions, saved from a recent restaurant excursion, for using chopsticks: Tuck under thumb and hold firmly. Add second chopstick, hold it as you hold a pencil. Hold first chopstick in original position, move the second one up and down. Now you can pick up anything.
He wanted me to learn the proper method, in which the eater only moves the top chopstick. Mine crossed in the back, both chopsticks moving at the same time, like a pair of scissors.
My husband smirked. Even though he’s not Chinese, he had the right approach, because he’s the sort who follows every step of the recipe while I’m always improvising before I get to the end of the instructions. “The food gets to my mouth. That’s what matters,” I said. With chopsticks, I ate enthusiastically and doggedly, but not always with finesse — which also describes how I’ve made my way in life.
Working Mom? My Heart is Trying to Tell Me Something
Washington Post
I was half naked, covered in a thin hospital gown, rolled onto my left side on the exam table. The tech spread cold, sticky gel over my chest and began circling the wand.
My heart appeared on the screen, silver and grey, the chambers exposed, beating, beating, beating. The mysteries and wonder of the human body on display. I was at the cardiologist’s to determine why I suffered shortness of breath, why it felt like my heart was skipping a beat dozens of times a day. Read More>>
I Used to Run Towards Danger
Dame
As soon I stepped off the plane in Abu Dhabi, the heat hit me. The air conditioning in the jet-way couldn’t beat back the desert shimmering through the tinted glass. In the terminal, I joined the throngs of women in black abayas and the men in flowing white dishdash and made my way toward my connecting flight to Kathmandu.
Just the day before, I’d kissed my 3-year-old twins in California good-bye while they slept. I’d be gone for two weeks on a reporting fellowship that I had been anticipating for months. My absence was a hardship for my family, but it was trip I knew I had to take. Read more>>
The Art of Chinese Cooking
Newsweek
I can make a mean seafood paella, but I never learned to cook the food my grandmother made. Read More >>
What I Learned By Wearing My Chinese Mother's Dress
Racked
My arms twisted behind me, my hands scrambling on the silk satin. I caught one end of the zipper and pulled it up. I could only reach so far with that hand from that angle, and I raised my left arm, dropped my forearm behind my shoulder, found the zipper, and closed the gap. I smoothed my hands down my sides, slippery as water.
I was wearing my mother's dress for the very first time.
The mini-dress had a slit up the right side and a pattern of white feathery embroidery and circles of Oriental design. The dress fit tight across my chest and snug on my thighs. I felt sexy.
An alarming thought struck me: My mother was sexy. She was a scientist, and I was a journalist, but sometimes, we both liked to strut. Read More>>