Tag Archives: Nostalgia is not what it used to be

Red Envelopes

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For Chinese New Year, instead of wrapped-up presents, children are given cold hard cash inside red envelopes for good luck.

We are a practical people.

I still remember the excitement on Chinese New Year’s eve: after the big dinner, my parents would call me to their bedroom and hand me a red envelope. My parents never bought me any presents partly because birthday celebrations for children had not been a popular concept although people do celebrate the elder’s significant birthdays such as when Grandma finally hits 80 and hasn’t kicked the bucket yet, and partly because we were not poor but not wealthy either.

That New Year’s Eve red envelope was IT.

Of course, every other adult that you see during the 15 days of Chinese New Year is expected to give you a red envelope. The more relatives and friends your family have, the more red envelopes you get. The more red envelopes you get, the higher your net worth becomes, that is, until your mother takes them all away, “I will save it for you!”

Of course, you never see that money again.

I am embarrassed to admit that, at least during Chinese New Year, you DO have a favorite aunt or uncle, the one who’s known to give out generous amount in their red envelopes. As soon as you wake up on the first day of Chinese New Year, you try to figure out WHEN you will be visiting them by asking your parents indirect questions such as,

“When are we going to visit this or that uncle/aunt?”

And then deny vehemently when your mother accuses you of wanting to visit them simply for the big, fat red envelope you know you’ll be getting.

You also will try and hide your disappointment when your mother strikes some stupid deal with an aunt of yours to NOT give red envelopes to each other’s children.

I don’t remember much from my childhood but I do remember counting the money vividly. It was a ritual in itself.

It was of course never polite to count the money right then and there and therefore I would stash the red envelopes away, in the pocket of my jacket, in my fuzzy poodle purse, in my oversized Japanese-style wallet, in my closet. (It has happened more than once, I believe, that I lost my red envelopes. The memory is fuzzy now because it was rather traumatic and I am pretty sure I have blocked it off…) The whole day the thought of those envelopes and HOW MUCH MONEY in each of them lingered, the way the burnt smell of exploded fireworks did, and those envelopes surely felt like they were burning a hole inside my pocket. I waited till the end of day to spread out all the red envelopes on the bed and counted out my loot. I took my time to take all the bills out, feel each one of them, take in the intoxicating smell of crisp new bills. I then return the money into the red envelopes, careful not to crease the bills. I remembered who gave me which red envelope by looking at the different design on each of them. This was important because later my mother needed to know who gave how much so that she could make sure to reciprocate next year. It’s amazing how she would remember the next year even though she did not take any notes when she was going through my red envelopes after Chinese New Year.

It was like a tacit agreement between us: She would grant me the pleasure of keeping the red envelopes and counting the money every night, and I would turn them all over when this was over.

Once I tried to stash away one of the red envelopes, and my mother asked coolly, “Aunt So-And-So did not give you a red envelope this year?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged with the studied casualness of a method actor, “I probably put it somewhere… Oh, yes, here it is.”

I never tried to fool her again.

Now in hindsight, as in right at this moment, I could have stashed away a hundred-dollar bill (40:1 Currency exchange rate, people, don’t get too excited) from at least some of the red envelopes. She would probably have never sensed anything wrong.

Nah. She would probably have caught me anyway.

Good times.

Being here by myself, I don’t really do anything special for Chinese New Year with my own kids. Although part of me felt guilty for sucking at bringing Chinese New Year magic to my children, some part of me felt this was merely nostalgiz playing an unfair trick. After all, according to everybody back home, Chinese New Year is not the way it was any more. Nowadays people take advantage of the 5-day holiday and travel abroad so you can hardly find anybody to visit during that week. Many overseas Chinese would also tell you that going back to Taiwan during Chinese New Year is the worst timing: your relatives and friends are probably out of the country, and most of the stores and restaurants are closed.

Perhaps because of its convenience, the tradition of giving children red envelopes remains, and it is the only Chinese New Year tradition I am consciously keeping. It was satisfying watching Mr. Monk’s eyes light up.

“You mean, you are just giving us this money?”

“Yup. This is Hong Bao. Red Envelope. It is for good luck.”

“Wow! You mean I get to keep the money inside?”

I wanted to say,  “And I am not taking it away from you when Chinese New Year is over.”

But it was late at night and this would entail a long story.

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Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson:  you find the present tense, but the past perfect!

— Owens Lee Pomeroy

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What do you know? Someone managed to kill my nostalgia for The Most Awesome Chinese Tradition aka Red Envelopes…

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The Chinese caption accompanying this picture says, "Kids, don't litter the envelopes otherwise the Monster, Year, will come after you!"

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Way to go rabid environmentalists for killing the happiness that comes with getting free money from every adult in your life!

Ants

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I have been thinking about ants a lot lately. Or rather, the absence of ants. It probably has a lot to do with all the holiday-related activities happening in this house: cookie baking, frosting, sprinkling, gingerbread house decorating. Every time when I see Mr. Monk walking around with a sugar cookie that he has added frosting and sprinkles to, I wince and say to him, “You are lucky we don’t have ants in this house.”

After saying that, I then half expect the ants to show up just to teach us a lesson. Hubris! I live in its shadow.

Moments like this remind me that one of the things about living in America I am most grateful for, in addition to the awesome return policy in most stores, is the lack of ants. The lack of paranoia that a single piece of crumb would attract a horde of ants within five minutes. And there are a lot of crumbs in this house. My kids are like crumb machines; their mouths, as what mothers in Taiwan would say, are like a chipped bowl.

Growing up in Taiwan, I was always wary of leaving crumbs on the floor partly because my mother was vigilant in covering up food and picking up crumbs while yelling “The ants will come and move you back to their colony at night!” and partly because swarms of ants really creep me out. Like the flying German cockroaches, ants are common in houses (i.e. apartments) in Taiwan, at least the places I lived in growing up. It does not matter how clean your house is, they still show up uninvited.

I remember watching wayward ants move along the cracks on the wall as I studied late at night. I followed their trajectories, mesmerized. The wall must be immense from their perspective, like traversing a desert plain. How do they find their friends? Sometimes I would set up “road blocks” by holding my ruler against the wall, forcing the lone ant to change her direction. Again. And again.

Now that I started down the memory lane, I realized that one of my most vivid childhood memories was also one of my greatest childhood traumas:

My mother came home one day from her job at the hotel with a rare treat: a piece of Black Forest Cake. A hotel guest had given my mother the leftover from their party. I had never owned something so extravagant in my life (at that time): The cake was fancifully decorated with delicate chocolate shavings with a cherry perching on top of a tower of whipped cream. It was too beautiful to be eaten and I could not bring myself to cause the cake to disappear. I left it out on the dinner table so I could admire it in all its glory and take my time to savor it later.

I fell asleep before I had the chance.

As soon as I opened my eyes the next morning, I remembered my cake! I put my face right next to it, Ah, CAKE! but noticed that the chocolate sprinkles were moving around…

My father ran to the scene following my scream. He took a lighter and got rid of the ants covering the entire cake. “Here. See? Your cake is ok again.”

“NOOOOOO!!!!!” I was inconsolable. “It is NOT!”

“Look! It tastes just as good.” He took a spoonful of the cake and put it in his mouth to show that the cake was still edible.

All I could do was cry as my father kept on taking a bite off the cake to convince me to try.

I can’t remember how long it took me to recover from the shock. But to this day, whenever I remember that scene, I can still feel the overwhelming sense of regret. If only.

As a grown-up, when I am at a bakery or a coffee shop, I can’t help but order a piece of Black Forest Cake if it is available. But somehow it never tastes as good as the piece that I had never tasted.

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You never know what’s going to remind you of your childhood…

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My mom and dad called last Friday. Actually my mom did. Mom’s always the one that calls. And she always calls around 9 pm when it is the absolutely most friggin’ chaotic in the house. And she always pleads innocence saying she cannot figure out the time difference. And she always asks, “Have you eaten yet?” even after I tell her “It is 9 pm here. Ma!”

“It is cold there now, right? It is freezing here.” My mom says. Every single time during the winter. Did I tell you that they live in Taiwan? A sub-tropical island? The temperature in Taipei was supposed to reach 69 °F that day (as opposed to 36 °F here in Chicago and actually considered to be warm since it is finally above friggin’ freezing…)

“Ma. Sigh. You do know that the weather there has nothing to do with the weather here, right?” I could not bite my tongue and just let this one go.

“But it is really cold here. I bet it feels colder here.” My mom is a “last-worder” too: that’s probably where I got it. Between my husband and myself, my kids are doomed both nature- and nurture-wise. “Do you want to talk to your dad? Oh wait. Your dad wants to talk to you. Actually, he asked me to call you.”

Pleasantly surprised since my dad never wanted to talk to me on the phone, not that he loves me less but because he’s a man, I screamed, “Ba!” (The Chinese word for “Dad”) when my mom handed him the receiver. At 80, my dad is hard of hearing nowadays.

“Have you eaten yet?” He said, without a beat.

Sigh. “Yes. I have.”

“Is it snowing in Chicago because it is really cold here.”

Sigh. “Actually it is warmer today because it is above freezing.”

“Really? That’s something.”

“So… what’s going on? What are you doing today?” I know better than to expect my 80-year-old father to tell me something exciting in his plan for the day.

“Nothing. Just watching TV…. You haven’t called home for a long time. Is your husband still out of the country?”

“Yeah. He’s in Spain this time.”

“That’s what I thought when you didn’t call home for a long time. You must be very busy with the kids then.”

As if on cue, my oldest came to stand by my side and whispered loudly, “Mom. Mom. Mom!”

I glared at him and pressed my point finger to my lips. Ignoring my gesture, he continued,

“Mom! My gum hurts because my tooth here,” he proceeded to open his mouth with both hands so I could see better, “See? It is coming out. My tooth! My gum hurts!”

I turned my back towards him. He did not give up and came around to the other side, “So I need to go see a dentist…”

“Dad. Hold on. Just a sec.” I switched to English to deal with the dental crisis that was not, “Can’t you see I am on the phone with my parents? We’ll talk about this later.”

As if he did not hear what I just said, he switched to a brand new subject, “Mom, we need to pick up my new glasses!”

“I will. Tomorrow! I need to bring you with when we pick up your glasses…” I gritted my teeth.

All this time, Mr. Monk was on the floor pouring sugar into a bowl so he could make crystals according to the science book that he got last November. He never showed interest in the darn book until I was on the phone. Now he was next to me as well,

“Mom. What is a saucer?… Is it this?” He pulled out the biggest pot to show me, making a loud clattering noise.

“NO! That is NOT a saucer. And why do you need a saucer NOW for god’s sake?!” I raised my voice.

Seriously. They were quietly reading at the kitchen table before the phone rang. It just seems that EVERY TIME when I am on the phone, all of a sudden they have urgent information to share, questions to ask, emergencies to deal with. The sky is falling! We need your attention NOW!

I could hear my dad on the other side of the phone line: “It sounds like your children need you. I just want to hear you voice. We’ll talk later.”

“No. Dad!” He hung up before I could protest further. I frantically tried to dial my parents’ phone number. I am not making this up: in order to call my folks, I need to dial 22 friggin’ numbers. That’s right. 22. After the third try, the call finally went through.

“Mom. Is dad there? Could I talk to him?”

“He hung up on you, didn’t he? That man. He always does that. I told him to give me the phone and he said you were busy! Here he is.”

“Dad. You didn’t have to hang up!”

“But you are busy. You should go tend to the children.”

Exasperated now. “No. They can wait. They are not babies any more. They need to learn to be respectful!”

Of course, all this was said in Chinese so my children did not get any benefits from this lecture which explained why at this exact moment, at the same time, my oldest decided to play on a laptop that ran out of power and was struggling to get the power cord out from behind a desk at the risk of toppling everything that was sitting on the desk, and my youngest decided to pour sugar solution (sugar:water 6:1) from a sauce pot into a shallow saucer.

I watched all of it unfold in slow motion, and I could feel myself boiling. I did not even bother to cover the receiver as I exploded.

“WHY CAN’T YOU SEE THAT I AM TALKING TO MY PARENTS? HOW OFTEN DO I GET TO TALK TO THEM? I AM ONLY ON THE PHONE FOR FIVE MINUTES! DID ANYBODY BLEED? IS ANYBODY DYING? NO? THEN DON’T INTERRUPT ME! NOTHING IS THAT URGENT! Go to your rooms NOW! No. Don’t touch anything. Leave that on the floor. Just GO TO YOUR ROOM!”

Switching to Chinese, “I am back. Dad, what were you saying?” I was expecting him to give me another lecture about being more lady-like.

“Whoa. You sounded just like my mother when we were little.” My dad commented.

My grandmother had 14 children. I have never met her, and my dad has not told me much about his mother, that is, he has never really reminisced about his childhood. When I was around, I was too young to ask these questions; now that I am old enough, I am not around enough.

Not sure whether this was something I should defend myself against, I defended my grandmother instead. “Well. There were so many of you. If she did not yell like that, she probably could not keep all of you in check.”

“That’s what I said. You sounded just like my mother.” He chuckled.  “That really reminds me of when I was a kid. We lived on a farm so she could yell like that without disturbing the neighbors.”

Maybe I was just imagining things, but he sounded like he had tears in his eyes when he said again, so quietly this time as if he weren’t talking to me,

“Wow. This really brings back childhood memories.”

Left-Handed

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I have been thinking about my parents a lot lately, especially yesterday. Thanksgiving does that to you, I guess.

In all honesty, I try not to think about them because when I do, the sense of guilt soon becomes too overwhelming: I have been lost to them since 1993 when I came to the U.S. for graduate school. The originally temporary stint abroad that was supposed to last only two years became the reality of me and them separated by the Pacific Ocean. And, oh, yeah, the land mass from here to the West Coast. Tenuously connected through phone calls, calculated according to a 14-hour time zone difference.

I sometimes wonder whether my father had regretted telling me, “Don’t come home for the summer. Travel around the U.S. You will be home less than a year anyway.” THAT was the summer I met my husband…

Sometimes I get upset at myself on behalf of my parents. Then I turn towards my own children and warn them, abruptly,

“When you grow up, if you move to a different continent, I am going to be really, really, really mad at you!” My teeth gnashing.

I’d walk away and hide myself in the bathroom, work myself into tears, remember this is probably how my parents feel, then become even more upset and turn into a hysterical mess.

Oy.

I did not realize my father is left-handed until this March when we visited my parents. They noticed that Mr. Monk was writing with his left hand.

“He’s left-handed? I guess it is ok nowadays to write with your left hand. Your father is left-handed too.” My mother said over the phone when I was back in the U.S.

“No. He is NOT!” I defended myself, against an accusation of inattentiveness that was not there.

“Oh yes he is. He is supposed to be left-handed. He writes with his right hand, indeed. But, you have never noticed? he uses scissors and knives with his left hand.”

Of course I have never noticed it. I left home when I was twenty-four. I was too young, too educated, too busy to live my life to notice my parents. As I get older and know better, however, I am not there to catch up.

Ever since that exchange, I often try to remember my father opening a letter with a pair of scissors (He does not believe in letter openers) or dissecting a pork shoulder roast (his favorite) with a cleaver. I imagine him using his left hand.

I don’t know how to explain to my husband or my boss that I really need to fly home because I need to see my father use his left hand…