Asian Fusion Family and Food
I came home from Costco recently with a trunk full of supplies: two loaves of bread, juice boxes, cereal, chicken, and a box of garbage bags. Only when I reached into the cabinet to put away the garbage bags, I realized there was another unopened package already there. This bugs me to no end.
I’ve never been one of those people who sees their car as a sartorial extension of their identity. Because then I would be a silver minivan — great for long road trips and hauling a team of soccer players, not so great for the ego.
But a few weeks ago, as I was driving up to San Francisco to visit a prospective grad school, I noticed something. The odometer in my van had flipped over 100,000.
Soccer Mom? Who, me? Grace tells about the surprising role of sports for her family in a new parenting anthology “Mamas and Papas”, available at City Works Press and Amazon.com. If you’re in So Cal, check it out at the San Diego Book Fair Saturday Oct.2!
The staple fast foods of my childhood came in little white and red boxes. No, not those Chinese take-out cartons — I mean the striped bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
My mother explained that when she first immigrated to America — specifically to the Midwest — she did not like the food
Peach season has HapaMama reminiscing about the children’s folktale of Momotaro… and trying out some delicious new recipes.
One of my projects this summer has been to help keep my eight year old engaged in reading (20 minutes a day! says the principal). To further that end, I created an informal Boys Book Club for my son and a few of his friends. While that may sound like a lot of additional work, I see it as harnessing peer pressure to be used in a constructive direction. If I can get my kid’s friends to think reading is cool, then they will, in turn, reinforce that message back to my kid. Voila!
HapaMama is featured on the front page of OpenSalon.com today! Everything I needed to know about the current state of education, I learned in my son’s Kindergarten.
As a second-generation Asian American, my relationship to my heritage feels tenuous sometimes. When I live in a neighborhood without a large Asian population, haven’t spoken Taiwanese or Mandarin on a regular basis in years, and then there’s the whole interracial marriage thing. As much as I might neglect my roots, some things are hardwired.
