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there is no period of time more desperate for single Chinese females over the age of thirty everywhere than the Annual Spinster-Shaming Festival, a.k.a. Chinese New Year.
not only did she act as the family’s unofficial private bank for the favored few, she’d basically raised the lot of them after my grandfather passed away in the 1950s and left my grandmother destitute.
since there is nothing that the Chinese respect more than wealth, especially the kind that might potentially trickle downstream. Posthumously.
Since my father was her favorite sibling, Auntie Wei Wei had paid off a lot of his debts when he passed and now she basically owns us, emotionally, which is how real power works.
cheongsams
boozing Tangs are not usually the problem: it’s the sober ones we had to be wary of, the ones drinking tea as black as their stony hearts, their beady eyes looking for fresh prey.
forced to recite the times table or some classical Chinese poem in front of these raptors, their breath bated
as they waited for me to make a mistake so they could run and get my parents—that way, we could all be shamed to...
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Why did mothers always think that if they recited random details about a person you’d never met in your life, you’d somehow magically know what they were talking about?
need the little moppets that come after us to be successful so they can in turn feed us. That’s why family is so important in most traditional Asian cultures.
Problem is, you can’t just shake off centuries of cultural mindfuckery that tell you that you are nothing but a sandworm without the benevolence and sacrificial love of your parents, who fed your worthless child self and molded you into the acceptable, if not exceptional, adult that you are, and that the only way you can ever hope to repay them is if you take the hopes and dreams your parents had for you and gently but surely stuff them down your brain hole,
make them yours, and realize them, or betray your parents and burn in the special place in Chinese Hell for unfilial children while eager but inefficient Chinese demons disembowel you ad infinitum.
Filial ...
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All the Tangs of our generation have to be married to inherit. And trust me, you’ll want to be in that will.”
have this whole open marriage arrangement with Magnus and we have a prenup, so both of us will be fine.”
eventually decided, after a mature, calm discussion where nothing was broken or hurled at the wall, that we had to Consciously Uncouple.
Ivan was inspirational, aspirational. I felt like I’d met my match, a kindred spirit.
you can only hate someone so much if you had once loved them in equal measure.”
Every good Chinese knows the proverb: dig your well before you are thirsty.
“It’s strange, isn’t it, how this form of racism is still accepted under the guise of ensuring that the new addition to your family has a ‘similar cultural background and value system’?
