fattening the tail end

asia series 1, the parent trap, seeing extended family, humans are timers

the parent trap

Let’s take a small intermission from Paris. Prior to my stay in the French capital, I traveled to Japan and Taiwan with my family.

The Tail End by Tim Urban was the gentle reminder that pushed me to take this trip. His point, in a nutshell, was that after about the age of 20, the time with your parents rapidly decreases especially if you’re “busy” and not regularly visiting them. I gather for myself, I’ve got about two decades left with the ‘rents, which sounds like a lot but if you’re only seeing them 5-6 weeks per year, that adds up to only about 750 days left. That’s a little bit frightening. My sister is busy as well, so to have a slot of time where all four of us could spend time together was a golden opportunity.

It was only after taking this Asia trip that I realized that perhaps my sister and I got my father hooked onto the travel bug because he reached out to us recently to try to organize a 2024 October trip. I have no evidence of this other than how happy he looked on our Taiwan trip (or perhaps it’s just his retirement years kicking in 🤷‍♂️). I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad smile all that often when growing up. That’s usually a good sign.

I think family trips can feel suffocating because at some point, your relationship with them ends up frozen in time. When you return, the parent resumes caretaking mode and the child assumes a kind of dependence mode despite the fact that both parties have changed. If you move past that though, it’s like any other friendship. You have to cultivate it, find time to spend together, and ... “get to know each other.” It sounds awkward in this context, but it’s what you do with friends, right?

Right. So I tried that. I treated my parents as friends, and found that this kind of treatment resets the tone. My dad wasn’t just my dad, he is someone I talk to about travel, cars, and jiujitsu. My mom wasn’t just my caretaker, she is an artist, a gardener, and a cook. More than anything, these are things I have interest in as well, so it makes sense then that I am their son, despite the joke that I was adopted (a story for another time).

There’s this card game called “Parents are Human” that helps generate deep conversation topics so you can learn more about your parents. I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems promising, albeit a little stilted. We instead asked our grandmother to teach us how to play Majong, and then sucked our parents into the whole shindig, betting plastic chips and making a racket for 4-5 hours every evening.

When you do this “friends” thing right, it’s amazing to see the true personalities of your parents.

During Majong, my mother, whose default role was the catastrophizing worry-wart, dropped the veil completely and a more carefree self appeared. Her personality mirrored that of her sister, who was known to be gregarious, enthusiastic, and loud as fuck (in a good way). 😎

My dad, whose default was the organized planner and the strategist through and through, benefited from getting lost and off schedule as we walked around in Osaka’s underground, looking for thick bowls of tsukemen and alleyway chicken ramen. We had to break the rules of the train station to get to this particular tsukemen spot and basically deactivated our train cards, but it was worth it. 😂

This is way. I anticipate doing this every time we travel now.

seeing extended family

The last time I saw my extended family was 11 years ago. Can you imagine that? A decade? For family? You wouldn’t do this for your friends, right? Naturally, if there was a decade to catch up on, there was a lot of drinking done (there’s that one night below I prefer not to talk about 🤗).

I was most excited to see my grandmother (mom’s side). She was the one who visited the U.S the most. I vividly recall her packing an entire suitcase of pork stuffed sesame breads (shao bings 燒餅 🤤🤤🤤) and smiling her way past customs 😂. I stuffed these mfs down my gullet after every early morning summer swim practice.

For a 97 year old woman though, my grandma looked healthy (like she was in her 70s, honestly) which was heartwarming to see. The biggest worry was that her mobility was limited and she didn’t have the same energy as she had before. There was still a sparkle in her eye, so despite all that, I really hope we brought a speck of light to her that week. I hope to see her again soon.

It was great, awkward, and sad to see extended family - a mix of emotions, really. We were exposed to weird thinking that never changed, the inevitability of old age, and the fact that I didn’t remember everyone and the difficulty of “being friends” in the throes of life.

One of the observations I made about myself between traditional Taiwanese folks and my Asian American upbringing is that I don’t have much filial piety. It’s for sure a trend of our generation but I just don’t feel it all that much for myself. It’s not that I don’t respect my parents or am not extremely grateful for them setting me off right, it’s that I sometimes don’t feel like I have an immense sense of duty to take care of them like a traditional Taiwanese son would. It’s definitely a couple notches below what we traditionally call “responsibility”. It might be that they’re self-sufficient and healthy, but I suspect that will change in the coming years, and I will perhaps change as I get older, more resourced, and less selfish.

Luckily, I’m on my way with this whole process of learning to be friends with my parents. I know it sounds odd, but if I don’t think about this now, I’m going to run out of time.

humans are timers

I have this document in my Obsidian folder named “parents history” which I’ve been slowly filling out - where they were born, why they moved around, what their childhood was like, why their preferences are their preferences, little journal entries, and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface.

The original idea for this document was to tabulate as many family recipes as I could before that history was lost. But now it’s something more. It’s like having a living historical document on how to be friends with someone you’ve known for a long time, which sounds completely ridiculous, but also necessary, if you’re anything like me and need to reframe the situation.

🤔 For you I say this: think on how this relates to you and your own parents (but not too long) and get on it, if there’s any getting on to be done. The clock is ticking and it’s more fun than you think!

Special thanks to my wonderful sister Joyce and my mother for taking pictures because if they didn’t, you’d just be staring at a wall of text. 😂 I must say, it’s some of the best family photos we’ve gotten.