Eight Eating Etiquettes with Asians.

I’m still in the CNY mode, so here goes. (By Asian, I mean Chinese. Sorry, South Asians!) Hopefully the advice belows makes you on good terms with Asians relating to their culture through dining. Especially if you’re meeting your hot Asian girlfriend’s parents for the first time and they’re not white-washed. For all the points below, assume you are eating at a Chinese restaurant, and you are the minority there. That means NOT Asian, buddy.

1.
Arrive on time. Needless to say, Asians are vey judgemental while not on the outside. Being late will only label you as a slob. And that’s minus 2 brownie points.

2.
If it’s a special occasion (ie. birthdays, Chinese New Years), bring a gift. Like oranges, because…that’s how Asians are (for lack of a better explanation). For Chinese New Years, I think the unspoken rule is that married folks need to give children money in red pockets.

When you are excepting gifts, it is custom to refuse it first, preferably 3 times. If the giver doesn’t not seem to want to insist 3 times, once is fine. As long as you look reluctant to receive it.

3.
Pour the tea for everybody. This is only polite, and you should do this especially for elderly people or people generally older than you. Do not order or water Coke, as that will make it seem like you are not trying to get to know your guests. Love the tea, and pretend you’re drinking coffee instead.

4.
Learn how to use chopsticks in advanced.
This will impress Asians a lot. Forks are a no-no.

5.
Answer the interrogation questions during mealtime. This is like an interview and if they don’t like you, you’re pretty much screwed. Make you job sound glorious, even if you’re a programmer. (No offence). Don’t say how you enjoy making out with the parents’ daughter or anything stupid like that. You might get…um…injured very badly.

6.
Research some Asian dishes you can order in advanced. You won’t be getting any French fries. Don’t order Western food in a Chinese restaurant. There’s a reason for that.

7.
Dress decent. Don’t overdress, but dress ‘decent’.

8.
Paying for the bill. I don’t know if only Asians can do this, but you must seem that you really want to pay for the meal to the extent of fighting for your right to pay. Yes, this seems ridiculous, but I assure you that this is not some Asian conspiracy to scam you for a free meal. Seriously.

And that’s it.
Don’t hold me responsible if anything back fires.
Because I’ll delete this site faster than you can say “Nee ho maa??”

Chinese New Year.

Yes, I am inexplicity Chinese.

And like most Asians that celebrate Chinese New Year, I also enjoy the get-togethers which proclaim the tradition of our forefathers before us. Where we can revel with those tiny mandarin oranges and rice wine. (I don’t really drink that stuff though.)

Being the third-generation of an immigrant family in Canada, all this multiculturalism takes away from the festivities just a little. I no longer go to the heritage Chinatown with my parents like I did when I was younger. (This is mainly due to hygienic reasons.) I no longer marvel at the old herbal shops and the family-oriented lifestyle. (“Orient”, haha.) And so this Chinese New Year, the year of the Golden Boar, has become mundane. The ritual of family dinners has been replaced with the risk of giving more money in red pockets (“lai see”) than in receiving them.

No wonder the youths of today, the generation Y, Z, ampersand, etc… feel so lost; they are a mash up of identities and cultural clashings. We have nothing to call our own, constantly warring with Western ideologies and Asian superstitions that lead to nowhere. The sheltered life where parents apply pressure for them to become doctors because that’s the only ‘respectable’ occupation. The result is the relaxed, complacent, and vegetative state of youths, rotting away on the internet, hanging out in malls and movie theatres. This social ambiguity is only fought with depression, distraction, and the formation of gangs. This is evident within new immigrant communities, where they first learn “Chinglish”, and mixture of Chinese dialect with various and random English nouns and verbs, a cacophony strung together.

I don’t know what to think anymore, but I know I’ll never see the color red the same way again.

A Picture.

Just thought it would match the theme.

Palindrome: Smut

She’s so pitiful. Look at the tear-stained face. Does she have no idea she’s making a fool out of herself? I knew I hated her the moment I saw her on the first day of school. It was just bad luck I had to endure all my classes with her; I would have to say it was torture. And now, the last year, the year of all highschool years, the graduating class. She was one of the popular” kids, of course. I’ve seen them, what they do behind her back. The snickers and the “she did this and that…” Even then, I felt no shame in spreading those online rumors. About how she made out with all the guys (or at least the desirable ones) in the boy’s restroom. And how she was such a slut.

She’s such a slut, how she made out with all the desirable guys in the boy’s restroom. I felt no shame spreading the online rumors, then. The snickers and the “she did this and that…” they do behind her back, I’ve seen them. She was one of the popular kids. And now, the graduating class, the highschool year of years, the last year; it would be torture. It was just bad luck I had to endure all my classes with her. On the first day of school, I knew she was hated the moment I saw her. Does she have no idea she’s making a fool out of herself? The face with the tear-stained look. She’s so pitiful.

Dear Mr. Sandwich,

I must be frank – I don’t think we can be friends, or even acquaintances, anymore. It only seemed like yesterday when I made you, and I think it was. Your outer shell, made of white bread, because whole wheat wouldn’t be good enough for my pal. With the white sesame seeds that graced the bread, you were handsome. And the freshest iceberg lettuce money can buy went into you. Tomatoes, proud and ripe, are embedded in your core, powering you, sir, with its succulent juices. I cut my finger for your cause, too. Cut my finger peeling the onions…for you. And you grew. Tasty. Mr. Sandwich. We can’t be friends anymore. This is the end, I’m afraid. But not as much as you should be.

Goodbye forever, Mr. Sandwich.

Eddy.

There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number —
living things both large and small.

There the ships go to and fro,
and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.
                                                  – Psalm 104:25-26

    Ironically, they met with a long, romantic walk on the beach, where the air, water and earth met. This sounds cliché, but real life is cliché sometimes. They got married three months later; an outdoor wedding and a honeymoon to Hawaii. She was confirmed pregnant two weeks later. Thirty-six days after, the couple went on a cruise to Alaska, safe above the churning waters and the unknown, because their future was in a sac of water inside her.

    Catastrophy. It’s a boy. A hydrocephalic boy. A boy with water, cerebral fluid, in his brain where white matter should be. He will never walk, the doctors tell them. Communication will be difficult and slurred speech should be expected. Hydrocephalics often only live until they are twenty. Twenty hard years. He will be living behind windows, never running or swimming, for that matter, because he has already has his share of water.

    He leaves; a man defeated by mere water.
In the note, he writes -

My love for you is deeper than the deepest oceans
And higher than the highest mountains
And my love proves it is greater than anything I will be
For I am a weak man
Sorry

    When she reads the note, a tear rolls down her cheek and splashes onto the white page; from her eyes flow all the bottomless oceans of the world.

Vapor.

The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
- Ecclesiastes 1:6

    This morning, while I was sitting on the bus, we passed by the humongous field that we usually pass by. However, this morning was different; a layer of fog stood one foot above the still-wet grass, a blanket covering the vast field from end to end. As the sun rose, light filtered in through the multicolored leaves and the world, through my eyes, was seen as a kaleidoscope. And somehow, I was kept alive by this air, this thing connected to everything else, fog, nature, purity, the helplessness of our race.

    There is a story of a Chinese man, from the GuanDong province of China who was being persecuted by the communist authorities. He had heard they were going to take him away the next morning. When his wife and two young children were asleep, he got on his knees and began to pray. That night he lamented and poured out his soul to whoever would listen. His neighbour, back from a wedding, heard his voice as he opened the door to his house. The neighbour casually walked over to the side of his house and said loudly, “Shuang houng chee sho wha?”, which translates to, “Why are you talking to air?” You’re crazy. The neighbour stood there for an answer, and the man kept on praying for another five minutes. Then he stood up, looked at the neighbour, and said, ‘The crazy know it’s more than just air they talk to.’

    I know there’s a moral somewhere. I just can’t put my finger on it. You figure it out.

My Resumé.

I hold the record for the longest abstinence of eating ginger and garlic, vegetables that aren’t even green like they should be. Unless you disguise them in disguises, like ginger ale or garlic bread. But nobody really counts those occasions, because that’s trickery and I’m a straight shooter.

I believe that paper breeds imagination, so I draw on desks instead. During class. Because you can’t neuter paper or imagination and because the posters on pet hospitals tell me you should. Over-population is bad enough with the crows, pigeons, and squirrels already.

Armed with only a short twig and sometimes the bottom of my right sandal, I can demolish colony after colony of ants and prove that I rightfully earned my title, the Ant-Bane. Once, using a butane lighter and newspaper, I tried burning my house down, but that didnt quite work out so I decided to become a petty arsonist and set fire to a wasps’ nest conveniently nestled underneath the gutter. I hear the police are still looking for me.

Every summer, I go feral and spend time with chickens in the wilderness, hunting for berries and dozing off in the shade. This summer, a nice lady found me and asked me if I lived on the streets at night. Or so she implied. A conversation started and she was surprised I wasn’t an illegal immigrant. I wonder how much money I would’ve got if I had said yes.

Nobody ever wants to assimilate me into their workforce because of their lack of intricate and implicit vocabulary. I know they really fear my knowledge and how I use a mnemonic device to recall the Linnaeus classification system, which I really learned from an ER and CSI addict. And maybe because I have three pages on my résumé and not two.
I have some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder. My doctor tells me I just think I do, but that could mean the same thing.

Like Superman, I run on solar energy and go phototherapy sessions three times a week to recharge. The only drawback to this is the risk of skin cancer, and, like Superman, I can fight it off. With UVA/UVB rays.

Speaking of running, I sprint faster than Mercury, and, unlike, other people, I have ten hole-ridden socks to prove it. I take three steps at a time going up stairs and at least five descending. I have been rejected by the police academy as well as the Olympics. I blame my high metabolism, aversion to donuts, and the unwillingness to participate in drug scandals to draw attention and publicity.

I have perfectly aligned teeth and don’t need braces. The secret is a strict diet on ice cream and highly-caffeinated drinks. It doesn’t stop caviities, but I’m still working on that. It shouldn’t take long because my IQ is 11 digits long.

I had my midlife crisis four months ago. I’m going to live until I’m thirty-four. Although I should live until sixty because I said school takes up a quarter of my life. No, I’ll live forever because I’ll keep on studying and accumulate a six-million dollar debt.

It may seem like I can do a lot of things, but I can’t. ‘Cause I don’t have a beard.

Silvia Plath Imitations.

 

My list grew longer.

 

Left, right, slide, upside-down. Things that I put down disappeared. When a neat and washed pile of clothes sat in a corner, destruction would be inevitable. Demolished completely by my hands. A new textbook ruined by my pens; my locker, a landfill. I had tried so hard to catch up to the first, second, third runners, only to fall behind to the place where you always get lapped. I would sleep everyday afterschool, waking in odd intervals, sometimes losing marks for late and messy work. I had no future. I hadn’t bothered to make one.

I had a dream. From it, I saw myself on a bed of needles, under a dark cloud. It began to move. Thousands at a time, mosquitoes puncturing the surface of my skin, drinking and toasting to the blood of my flesh. As my own blood, the special juice, filled each one up, I raised and dropped my palms, painting abstract masterpieces of red and black on my arms, my legs…everything. They multiplied, coming on faster and faster. My arms blurred, matching their pace. But then my vision clouded black and I could see nothing. And then, my head through the layers of wings and legs. Having their fill, they had all died. Except one. Who, as I had become exhausted and closed my eyes to sleep, landed on one of the fingers of my right hand. I felt the stream of blood open up to it, and I surrendered to the unknown, the leeching vampire, eternally feeding.

But nothing lives forever.

——————————————————————-

ZAP!

A thousand volts into five of those flying buggers and the black swarm still came. They dropped to the hard linoleum floor dozens at a time like noiseless rain. My love of chocolate, gone in a furious swipe. The dense cloud of buzzing insects showed no signs of dispersing.

ZAP!

Another handful, fried, fell spasming uncontrollably before becoming motionless. My job as a medical doctor, pharmacist, brain surgeon. But I knew they were doomed from the beginning. This wasn’t doing any good. Angry, I waved the paddle-like object faster and faster until my arm became a blur. And I watched them fall: Billionaire, talent show winner, record breaker, extreme unicyclist, full-contact chessmaster. I looked back and forth, trying to spot for any challengers, the environmental activist, humanitarian, mediator. But they must have gone down with the others.

ZAP!

Buzz!
I had lost the time and part of my mind. When I became conscious of where I was, in a kitchen ankle-deep in a sea of black, I realized none of them had made it. I poked around the hard, chitin bodies with the now spent zapper. And I heard a buzz and the translucent wings of a worry-wort.