Growing up Chinese-American, my story felt different. Did my family have traditions? Not in the way holiday cards defined traditions, with stockings by the fireplace and egg hunts on fresh-cut grass. But we did have them, passed down from thousands of years of ancestral history. My parents, first-generation immigrants who met in Berkeley, California, in the ’70s, were simultaneously adapting to their new world and holding onto their shared culture, while teaching my sister and me along the way. An abridged list of dichotomies: celebrating Christmas with hot pot and hong baos (red envelopes). Learning cursive during the day and coming home to practice calligraphy at night with my dad. Reading Archie comics under the table during elaborate banquet dinners in Chinatown with extended family (which always ended with aunties and uncles fighting over the check—family takes care of family).
We were trying to straddle two cultures and find a balance. Sometimes I was happy toggling between the two, having a secret language and family life to fall back on; other times, I desperately wanted to be Stephanie Tanner on Full House, just to try on that sitcom life. I would tell friends that we had a big fluffy dog and a pool in the backyard or that my mom made meat loaf the other night, even though none of it was true.
I didn’t have a stage mom or a bake-sale mom or a soccer mom. Phone calls never ended with “I love you!” Our love was between the lines. She was more comfortable showing affection through lessons in hard work, something she picked up from her own upbringing. When I didn’t get into advanced math in junior high, for example, she convinced the school to let me retake the test. We stayed up late three nights in a row as she grilled me on numbers and pumped me full of ginkgo biloba. Similar to many immigrant parents, there was academic pressure and a steer toward math and science because they’re tangible and objective; you can’t argue with a good grade or a reliable job.
Petite, elegant, and wildly eccentric, my mom was also a fan of discipline, sometimes in public. Once, in the middle of a Staples, she yelled at me in Chinglish—I can’t remember the context. What I do remember, though, was the white woman who approached us at the checkout line. “Sweetie, if you ever need anything, please call me,” she said, pressing a note into my hand. Then she asked if she could give me a hug. My cheeks burned. I felt small, angry, confused, exposed, humiliated. Most of all, I felt protective. Here was someone who had witnessed this cracked prism of cultural narratives and found it so alarming that she would try to reach out and save me—from my own mom.