Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Pay our respects

In Chinese culture, it is the season of Ching Ming. April 5th of every year signals the time to pay respects to ancestors at their respective grave sites. Because the actual date can land on a weekday, people tend go during the weekends immediate, before, or after.

I’ve been told the proper way to do Ching Ming is go to the cemetery in the morning. The tombstones get cleaned, and so does the area surrounding. Family members then pay respects with three sticks of incense and three bows. Fake paper money gets burned, so ancestors in the afterlife will have money to use. (These days you can even burn paper houses and paper iPhones.) Various food items are laid in front of the tombstone as offerings, and rice wine is poured onto the ground.

After the ceremony, you have a meal with your (living) family members.

2024 is the first year I get to pay respects to both of my maternal grandparents. Thankfully, they wasted a ton of money for plots at the nearby Cypress Lawn cemetery (my own parents, instead of spending money for holes in the ground, will elect to have their ashes spread), so Ching Ming for me is a mere 10 minute drive away. The festival in China - where my dad’s side of the family resides - is comparatively more arduous logistically: the ancestral grounds are a two hour drive from Guangzhou.

Of which I am looking forward to next year, as I will be flying to China for Ching Ming 2025. I’ve never perform the rites (as an adult) for my paternal grandparents, so it’s time to check off that box.

Chinatown futures

This past weekend there was a car show in San Francisco’s chinatown. Organizers closed down Grant Avenue, from California all the way to Broadway. A reputed 100 cars of varying price and exoticism showed up for the event. It was a amazing to see. One, because you generally don’t expect to see a car show in Chinatown. Two, it’s great that people are holding events in Chinatown to stimulate the local economy. We absolutely cannot let this historic enclave die.

It’s tough, though. The pandemic have knocked more than a few places out of business. The remaining restaurants and shops are mostly run by people of my parents’ generation. You really don’t see my generation accepting the baton and continuing on the legacy (so to speak). And it makes sense: Asian parents toil endlessly to give their children a better life. They aspire for us to be people of power and influence in corporate America (plus the usual doctor and lawyer). Running a gift shop in Chinatown is most certainly not that.

I have a friend whose parents recently retired from operating a restaurant out in the east bay. My friend and his siblings have no desire to takeover the family business. Because they’ve all got better jobs and a far easier life than sweating in a kitchen six days a week. The family ended up selling the restaurant.

So there is a some latent concern about what Chinatown will look like in a few years’ time. Who will take up the mantel once the current owners and operators retire - if it won’t be their offsprings? I think it will have to be the same type of people who my friend’s parents sold their restaurant to. Working-class Chinese immigrants who’ve been in this country for a bit - so they have some saved capital - and are looking for the next step up in investment.

Death of a grandmother

Thursday night, my maternal grandmother passed away. It’s something the family have anticipated for awhile now, so the news wasn’t too shocking. Probably more relief than anything: grandmother is not suffering anymore. Ever since she took a nasty fall back in early April and then later diagnosed with lung cancer, she’s been in a palliative care situation ever since. She’s a fighter for sure, a long and tough 89 years of life. May the deity in the sky rests her soul.

I largely owe my current existence here in America to my grandmother. She brought my mom and dad over here from China on a family visa. How completely different my life would have been had we stayed in China instead. An alternative timeline not worth pondering about. I’m just grateful and thankful my grandmother made this timeline possible.

Due to ongoing COVID-related restrictions, I’ve long said my official goodbyes to grandmother some months back. The facility permits one visitor at a time, no longer than 30 minutes. Said visitor needs a same-day negative rapid test, and has to fully suit-up with protective gear. Because of that, it was more prudent for my mother and her siblings to do a rotation of sorts. Most of the grandkids visited once and that was it.

Due to Chinese cultural superstition, I now cannot attend my good friend’s - who is Chinese - wedding next Sunday. It is considered very unlucky to partake in celebratory events, until the deceased is properly buried and funeral rites performed. That won’t happen for my grandmother until the Sunday after next. So it is with great disappointment that I had to inform my friend I will be bowing out of wedding party duties.

He and I probably don’t care at all about superstitions, but our parents certainly do. It’s a shame and slightly unfair that I have to miss once-in-a-lifetime (you’d hope!) life milestone of a good friend. Simply to appease the spirits of our dead ancestors. Honestly, I am a bit mad about it.

Immigrant dad

On a visit back home to my parents’ place, I noticed my father’s coffee mug has a large piece of gaffer tape at the bottom. I thought to myself: that it’s obviously broken! Why not buy another one? Then I realize my parents have that mentality that they won’t replace an item unless it’s absolutely broken. It’s that working-class, immigrant Chinese mentality. They wouldn’t dare to spend extravagantly on themselves, even if it’s just 20 bucks on a new coffee mug.

All (what little) of that disposable income go towards the children, and the future. Even if said children is fully grown (that’s me!) and the monthly paycheck isn’t so tight anymore.

So I had to step in. I went straight Amazon to buy a Yeti-branded coffee tumbler. The same one I’ve been happily using for well over a year. No more generic mugs from some random store in Chinatown for my father. He was so excited (in the Chinese immigrant dad sort of way, which is to say, not overtly) when I gave the Yeti to him. He immediately went to clean off the product labels, give it a solid scrub, then make a cup of coffee.

Finally. A proper mug.

A week later, my mom mentioned to me that father was very impressed with how long the Yeti tumbler kept the coffee hot. He’s really enjoying his cup of morning coffee these days. It wasn’t lost on me that it was mom who told me this, instead of father directly having a conversation with me. Some things don’t change! That’s fine, though: it makes me happy to be able to buy him something he wouldn’t have otherwise. A mere $30 dollar mug can do so much.

Mom's cooking

One of the things that comes with being Chinese is that even though you’ve moved out, your parents will still constantly give you food. Of course, that’s provided you didn’t move too far away from the house. The independent-minded you may think this goes against the meaning of truly being on your own, and on principle I’m inclined to agree. However, there are certain days that you are glad there’s food in the fridge ready to go.

I can see why take-out ordering is so popular with my generation. After a particular tough day at work, you really don’t want to spend the half hour or so cooking up dinner. It’s far easier to order something on DoorDash and have it deliveredr while you go on about something else. Or, you know, hang out on twitter until the food arrives. What I’m saying is, I get it: the will to actually cook dinner is inverse to how hard you’ve worked that day.

Which is why some days I am glad to have my mom’s cooking ready to go for the microwave. It’s certainly faster than ordering food, and I save a boatload of money not eating out. I definitely don’t make the level of income to sustain a take-out ordering habit, though I think I would totally do so if I earned more. Good thing there isn’t a Hong Kong style restaurant nearby, because I would totally patronize that for dinner every chance I get.

I don’t know how my friends with kids do it. Cooking for myself after a tiring day is difficult enough. To make enough food for more than one person? Kids that bitch about the variety of dinner deserves to get slapped. You have no idea how hard it is to cook dinner after work on a weekday until you move out on your own, and have to do it yourself.

Time to heat up the food my mom gave me this week.

The cold winter days

It’s been seasonably cold lately here in San Francisco, which is a stark change from the past few years where our winters have been relatively warm and very dry. It’s so cold that even my Asian mom have consented to the use of the central heating, though of course we set the temperature at just enough to be comfortable with two layers on. The dream of walking around with t-shirts and shorts during the winter months will remain a fantasy until I move out of the house.

If I can afford to move out of the house.

The severely unaffordable Bay Area housing market have ceased to be a point of anguish for me, and now I have this content resignation of my current situation of living at home (being Asian is awesome). It isn’t so bad at all: I get to hang out with my parents while helping them out around the house, and furthermore, I’m not spending half my income simply to house myself. Our parents are only as young as they are today - as we all are - so time spent with them is super important and never a “waste”, no matter what society dictates as the stage of life I’m suppose to in given my age.

The people that reflect on life and wish they’d spent more time with their parents? I don’t think I’ll have that problem. If anything, I’m front-loading the majority of it, instead of circling back to it many years later after I’ve established my own family. Besides, in Chinese culture you don’t abandon your parents under any circumstances: my aunt is still taking care of my grandparents to this day, even though she herself have already become a grandmother. The family unit is strong in Chinese culture because we stick together and help each other out.

That’s the story I’m telling myself anyways. I don’t pretend to not want to move out at all: I think the challenge of independence is something worth doing and a necessary learning experience. But the crisis in San Francisco is what it is, so I’ve stop lamenting the impossible housing problem and instead focusing on spending quality time with my family while the opportunity is still here. Hard to say what’s going happen a few years down the road, but focusing on the future isn’t helpful anyways.