“I don’t care about Star Wars and I never fucking did!”

This is why I love Amy Poehler. Thank you.

Sisterly obligation to be mean

Once, when I was young and upset at my sister for being mean to me yet again, in a fit of frustration, I bluntly asked her, “Why are you so mean to me?”

She answered, “Because I’m your sister.”

As if it were a rule or a law that sisters must be mean to their brothers, or as if she was under contract that declared under one of the major headings that she had to treat her male sibling not like he was a family member, but like the loner kid in elementary school who was too easy to make fun of. Or as if her blood tie to me rendered her mind and her body incapable of being kind or supportive.

As if she couldn’t control herself when she laughed at me or put me down.

Dream 13

Aug. 20, 2005

I was in the old house and running downstairs.  Maggie and Florrie were out to get me some reason.   The bathroom door would not close and therefore, Maggie somehow took the door off.  I ran to the next room but it also failed to close and Maggie took that door off too.  I ran to the room next to Florrie’s and just closed it.  I started opening the window when Maggie came in.  her nose was a little bloody even though I hadn’t really done anything to her, except maybe push a door in her face.  I got down and she started punching me but I dodged them.  She then started kicking but I was too far away.  I grabbed one of her legs when she was kicking and swung her against a wall.  She lay face down.  I finished opening the window and looked back at her, just to see if she was going to miraculously wake up.

But she didn’t.

I ran out the window and heard Florrie coming out of the front door, saying, “Hey!”  I think there were subtitles…

[dreaming in subtitles?  That’s really weird and I think I might just use that for my screenplay about dreams…]

Family Event

An assignment for non-fiction class about a family dinner.

Family Event

I am told to write about an event of some sort about my family but nothing comes to mind.  I also don’t remember much of my childhood, and have even less memories involving my family; simple things like dinners at home are a blank to me, though I can speculate what may have happened.  Not knowing what else to do, I ask my older sister, Florence.

We’re supposed to be killing computer-generated people and warriors in an Age of Empires game online but instead, I stall and ask her some questions about our family before she hits the start button in the chatroom.

“Do you remember having dinner together as a family when we were younger?” I ask.

“Yes.  I made dinners” is her reply.  Florence is nine years older than me and my twin sister, Maggie.  I don’t remember her making dinner.  I can imagine it and it seems like it could be real but I don’t have any actual memories of it.

“Father didn’t cook and mommy worked often,” she continues.  This also makes sense.  It’s not that my dad couldn’t cook because I remember him teaching me how to cook vegetables one time, so I’m left to wonder why he didn’t do it for us then.

I tell her I can’t recall any time we as a family sat down and had dinner or dinners with other relatives.  She tells me how there were occasions when we would have dinner with our grandparents and someone would usually end up crying.

This disturbs me, and I know it to be true as well.  Perhaps I am only used to the mother I know now, who doesn’t yell very often and have lost touch with the one who would to yell at her children.

Florence tells me, “Maggie would start crying if she didn’t eat certain things, or if you were bad and mommy yelled at you, or if I spilled something and get yelled at.”  I ask where dad was during this and I she merely confirms what I’ve been thinking: “eating”.

I imagine my mother’s loud, shrill voice, hurling insults at me in Cantonese while I stare down at my bowl of rice, feeling powerless.  As tears gather in my eyes, I feel aversion and embarrassment of my sisters’ eyes, and my father, watching the news on TV as if nothing was happening at all.

When I ask her if there was anything else we did together, she mentions grocery shopping.  Immediately, I remember that: my father always standing by the cart, indifferent to everything, while my mother, my sisters and I would go help bring preapproved food (by my mom).  But then Florence tells me Maggie and I would go into the toy and book aisles so we “wouldn’t get in the way”, and Florence would she looked after us.

There were questions my older sister couldn’t answer and she advised me to ask my mom, which I was reluctant to do because I didn’t think my mother would give me a straight answer.  My mother is the type of person who might pretend she doesn’t remember something but would simply rather not talk about it.  But I did ask anyway, to listen to what she had to say, when she came home and sat herself down in her green, mushroom-printed nightgown, in front of some Chinese programming on TV.

“Why didn’t we do things as a family?”  My mother gives me a look.

“Sure we did.  We went on vacations and trips…”

“But dad never came.”

“That’s because he would faint on planes,” my mom tells me.  “When you were young, we took a trip to Taiwan and he fainted at the terminal, before getting on the plane.  After that, he never went on another plane.”

I ponder this.  Maybe my dad had an excuse but…

“What about other things?  Like going out or doing activities together?”

“Well, those times we went to grandma’s birthday dinners and those potlucks—

“No, I mean things with just us.”

“We did lots of things together!  We had dinner at home!”

If the first thing my mother answers when I ask her about things we do together is dinner, then I know there’s probably not much else we were all there for.

“No, that doesn’t count.  Other things.”

“We did lots of things.  You just don’t remember,” she replies vaguely, before conveniently getting up and walking to the kitchen.

 

Perhaps my mother’s right; I just don’t remember the things we used to do.  Or perhaps the memories I’ve been searching for don’t exist.  Whatever the case, I know now that if I am to ever raise a family, I am determined to give them memories – memories they can write down and remember as good ones the rest of their lives.