I spend the wee morning hours jet-lagged, contemplating an early morning run before sunrise (Maybeee? Uhh, naaaah) or reading in Michelle Obama’s voice on the dimmest Kindle setting. My mom is next to me in bed, and I do everything I possibly can to prevent waking her. As she stirs and exhales deeply, I listen sideways out of my ears for when the movements stop and her breath slows to a shallow rhythm. I’m careful about not moving beside her or inadvertently shining light towards her.
In Becoming, Michelle describes drives her father used to take her family on through an affluent part of Chicago’s South Side:
“An area known as Pill Hill due to an apparently large number of African American doctors living there… where people kept two cars in the driveway and had abundant beds of flowers blooming along their walkways”.
Well-manicured lawns, hilly terrain, gates, houses painted-appeasingly in dreamy pale shades, driveways, and all that. She postulates, wondering if this was an aspirational exercise from her father.
Early on Christmas Eve, my mom asked the “kiddos” what we wanted to do that day.
The look of “no idea” was given on my face.
In the last 10 years, Christmas at extended family members’ homes died off as a thing. College graduates moved away, family members got sick. For those who were well, dim sum Christmas mornings, became the thing instead. They’re easy, no clean up, no huge planning required, and none of us trapped in an enclosed space with each other for hours of grandkid comparison held hostage.
“Well, nothing is open on Christmas besides Chinese-food takeout restaurants and the movies.”
I could already imagine my parents coming out of the theater, commenting on the expense, calculating the ratio of time spent “enjoying” the movie per a dollar. A movie ticket at a theater I used to go to in high school, is now 18 dollars, as opposed to 12 dollars, 10 years ago.
“How about a museum?” I suggested, a catalogue of low-cost, donation-based museums option already flipping through my head.
“A museum, what is there to see in a museum?” My mom clucked. Before the suggestion even slipped out of my mouth, I knew my mom would have something to say like that. She’s always found the idea of going to a museum strange, probably pretentious, definitely intimidating.
I still always make the suggestion. I’ve found some success in recent years, especially when outside of New York City, in getting my mom to try and do new things outside of her comfort zone. If I’m real, chipping and chipping away at the old habits and patternings of my family members has become somewhat of a pastime and a secret pleasure. I return home only twice or thrice a year, so why not?
As the afternoon progressed, the suggestion of going to see lights on Brooklyn lawns became a suggestion raised by my mom. Deep down, a smile broke inside of me. “A perfect suggestion…”
My family and I drove to Dyker Heights, and walked through the Bensonhurst neighborhood blocks. We drove around in Uncle Li’s car –we borrowed it, for the week that I was home. I suggested to my brother that we find parking somewhere. There was no way in hell that I was going to let the opportunity pass by, to get my parents to go for a walk outside the house, to create a memory together, to talk, to be forced to be present enough together to create a memory.
“No phones zone,” I said cheerfully and half-jokingly as I opened the car door.
“But how will we take photos?” Dad bemoaned.
“Okay, sometimes phone zone, sometimes not,” I joked.
Dad, in recent years, has gotten progressively deeper into the world of his phone. It’s a shield against small talk. Posts on Taiwanese politics on Facebook and likes on his karaoke app become a form of reconciling and wrestling with his homeland.
As we walked through the landscape, I hooked my arm around my dad’s arm, cradled my face against the puffy sleeve of his coat. I wondered how much of what we were seeing could feel like an aspirational exercise for my parents in their old age. I made my dad stop for silly pictures while my brother walked ahead, clearly not amused by the crafted Christmas scenes around us. My mom pointed out the music that I asked to gravitate towards. My dad joked about the walk being like strolling through the museum, but with live people.
Our one-bedroom apartment in on the border of Park Slope and Sunset Park was bought in cash in the eighties. Graffiti-laden brick buildings surrounded. Sounds went bump in the night were the prostitutes working right underneath, in the basement below. I slept in the living room, and I never really noticed the bars on the windows of my room on the ground floor or recognized their purpose until high school years.
I always identified with “low-income.” Most of my high school peers were the same. The forms I shuffled back-and-forth between home and school at the beginning of each school year resulted in me never having to pay for school lunch. As a kid, getting Lunchables for a field trip was a once a year treat. Once, I even lied about having a field trip at school, so that my parents would buy me Lunchables, so I would have what the other kids at the other tables had. Too bad my dad came to school to double-check about the field trip he never got a permission slip for. Ooops, busted. One time, I changed the numbers on the form, hoping that I’d magically be forced to pay 40 cents for reduced-price lunch, but that never happened.
I’ve thought a lot about this part of my identity growing through an experimental early college-high-school with a wide range of socioeconomic levels represented. I started working two jobs when I turned 16. Before then, my parents supplied me with a twenty-dollar bill to keep in my wallet, in the event that I got robbed coming home late at night, so that I would “have something to give” to the robber. I became even more aware of it, the “low-income,” at an elite, private university while on scholarship. Finally having some personal space in college and not having to constantly be in the space of so many personalities, only having one person to share a room with freshman year? I reveled in that.
Every time I come home, I am reminded of what “low-income” in one Chinese immigrant family looks like. I get enveloped into the mix, of struggle, of strength in this urban oasis, full of culture, hustle, pride…
Makeshift racks built and set against walls of Chinese dried goods in my parents’ bedroom, laundry hung on suitcase handles, my dad and I taking nightly shifts sleeping on the living room floor, my “brother’s room,” hardly any space to walk through the hall of our railroad-style apartment after a Costco trip these are the trappings of the low-income, “Lin” family home.
Eating on a long wooden slab pulled out of some corner, my mom’s cooking prepared atop of it in the living room, for 13 of my closest friends,
reuse of all things reusable, mixed furniture, a dad that always knows where everything is in a chaotic, hoarder-like apartment, and the bump and humming of the subway tracks below me, brought me closer quickly to the backpacker experience of living out of a suitcase with hardly any “things.” The pleasure of the simple things, storytelling and come-again jokes being passed around, the comedy between all the household’s members, those are also the blessings of my family at home.
One year, my brother and I bought my dad a lightweight, commuting bicycle for Father’s Day, something that my dad would have never bought for himself. Within a few months, the sleek logo and design had all been covered up with black tape. A Kyrptonite U-lock was installed with makeshift wires in the triangle of the top tube, down tube, and seat tube, and a black plastic milk crate had been installed on the back. When my brother asked why my Dad would do such a thing, Dad matter-of-factly proclaimed, “This is the best way to prevent the bike from being stolen. Nobody wants a languiche, a sorry-looking bike.”
Once we got home, I fished, “How did you like seeing the lights?”
My brother hadn’t been impressed. He had walked on ahead, mildly-successful in his best attempts to hurry us along.
“It was nice,” my parents spoke at the same time, while taking off their coats. Dad turned on the television, mom and him readying for their nightly ritual, Chinese drama on the one Chinese channel in our one-bedroom, one-family Chinese-American-Taiwanese home.
