Social tales

Thursday
Had dinner with one of the writers from the Sunday writing group. We stayed till closing time. She is so lovely and positive. I’m a little in love, and I told her so.
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Raising baby goats

A dear friend from college has two children.
Another close friend from college is trying to have a baby.
My best friend from high school just had twins.
Yesterday, the young assistant said to me, “Don’t you want children? You’d make a great mother.” She said this in all sincerity.
But I’m more comfortable with the word aunt.
My biological [...]

Year of the rat

I am in Flushing, in my parents’ apartment. I am messing up the Post-it notes on my mother’s desk. She comes over and puts them back in order. Then she picks up the pencil holder and sets it down an inch away from the corner of the desk. I give her a kiss on the [...]

Main Street, Flushing

I had coffee and banana muffins with my mother in a Chinese bakery, where we sat before rows of birthday cakes of pastel yellow and pink, some shaped as pigs, some as blowfish, some as bears, and all with large Disney eyes and shiny bits of fruit clustered atop the heads to indicate hair, and [...]

Crazy

D: My mother is crazy. Korean mothers are crazy in general.
me: My sister has a Korean mother-in-law. She has mentioned something about this woman possessing the crazy.
G: Crazy, really? I mean, I know crazy.
me: You’re thinking of clinically crazy, G.
G [doesn't hear me]: I wouldn’t say my mother is crazy, maybe more just stuck in [...]

“Home”

Thoughts on a Quiet Night
by Li Pai
Before my bed the light is so bright
it looks like a layer of frost
lifting my head I gaze at the moon
lying back down I think of home
—from Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology
of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse, translated by Red Pine
Li Pai (701–762), aka Li Po, was born [...]

A party in Flushing

Middle-aged Chinese divorcees and retirees living in Flushing are a funny bunch. They take ballroom dance classes together, play mah-jongg Cantonese style, do tai chi in the morning in Flushing Meadows Park, take singing lessons, and go on cruises or tour Alaska, Athens, Paris, Rome. The women wear designer jeans sporting rhinestones and sequins, get their long [...]

My mother gave birth to Daughter #2 today, some thirty-odd years ago

I have a feeling my family’s playing a belated April Fool’s joke on me. J will be horrified if it’s not a joke. And because I just finished proofreading a memoir about a writer’s very personal and combative relationship with God, all I can think to do right now is shake my head at the ceiling and [...]

Oh shit, it’s March!

My sister’s birthday just ended. She’s officially thirty-nine again.

Just ask

I’m in my parents’ apartment right now. My mother’s been cooking nonstop since I got in. She made lunch for us earlier, and is now preparing dinner.
No, it’s not true about the nonstop cooking. She stopped to give me her attention for an hour. I had to ask her a favor. And now she’s helped [...]

“Useless”

In the large room there was the clamour of card playing and later the usual conversation which Father carries on when he is well, as he is today, loudly if not coherently. The words represented only small shapes in a formless clamour. Little Felix slept in the girls’ room, the door of which was wide [...]