One Woman's Search for Not A Gotdamn Thing Across All the Countries She's Able to Take Her Broke Ass

9.30.2011

Fuckin' hilarious

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Y'can't beat anthropomorphized kitty cats. Ya just can't.

 

9.27.2011

Mo' Money, Mo' Pro'lems (12/20/10, Later That Day)

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The complex is fecund with food plants: papaya tree, star fruit tree, coffee shrubs...

And then this one bush with tiny, cream-colored flowers that smell like gardenias on the verge of rotting, like pua keni keni, like some too sweet, provocative, dying thing:





My paternal grandparents were farmers, growing mostly everything, vegetables and such, the whole hog (literally) for their own sustenance, but then table grapes to sell fo' cash money. So, after the touching moments inside the house (not really, more intuited than expressed), we go out to look at the grapevines. It's well past harvest now, so everything's dessicated, old, and gnarly (like my heart! or vagina!):





And then to the temple (Daoist??) that stands on land my grandfather donated; his name and the name of an uncle is listed on this benefactor's plaque--not that I could pick 'em out if ya held a gun to my head, and in fact, it could say "Always plug your butthole with nonporous items" for all I know...):





Do not enter through large middle door--it is reserved for the gods, VIP-only entrance, you better be orderin' bottle service and double mags of Moet, son:





One enters through either of the side doors, per my uncle:





Beware the...lions. (Apparently, these lions have powerful mythic protective elements. Aaarrrr~!)





Ghost money to be burned and, it goes without saying, converted into currency for use in the after life. I'm dead, but I'm ballin':





The dude in the middle, I fink he's important:





The back sides of the doors are kinda dope:





Dude's like, "two fangers, motherfucker!"





And now for the good part, and goddamn me for wearing jeans: the obligatory treating to a massive meal. To what? To show one's love? To welcome long-absent relatives? To show you're a baller, shot caller? (There's gotta be a beettteerr way, better way...yeah!)


Yes, when it comes to fine dining, I always look for the pillars of "Speciaity," "Exact," and "Care".



I don't know when this started happening or if I just never noticed, but the first course is a massive boat of sushi:





I take a piece of cooked squid, not because I want it, but because I don't want to look greedy, because I'm trying to not be greedy, which is like telling the sun not to shine.


Boring, blech; do not want.



And then I immediately wonder where they're judging me for being the dumbass that picks the goddamn cooked squid, like "who is this barbarian American? Why don't you just eat the tablecloth, fuckface?"

This comes out next, and it is fuckin' exciting: shrimp cooked at the table in a wok filled with sea salt. The anticipation builds:





Pescado. Pan-fried and smothered in green onion and ginger, basically what cilantro is to the Mexican and Thai, green onion and ginger is to the Chinese.





Soup's on: some kind of pumpkin-ish (kabocha, maybe?) thing, fake crab, shrimp, and pencil eraser-sized scallops. De-lish.





Pork course: crispy skin flaking away from the tender flesh; sour, pickled mustard root. Jesus...Christ on a cracker:





Sorry, y'all. I dunno what the fuck this is.





The shrimp's done at last--all flare and not that much flavor:





Slices of Chinese sausages with varying fat content on a bed of sticky (greasy, delicious) rice:





I don't know where we got this idea--the double-baked potato skin with a mayo-cheese (among other things) mixture. I'm guessing it's some corruption of the American dish, part of the whole hybridized steakhouse experience (more on this later).





Sauteed pea shoots, shiitake mushrooms...





Random...Cantonese...siumai...in regular...and...green?





And because the Chinese are renowned pastry chefs, the piece de resistance:



Et voila! A fruit plate!

 

Indonesia

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Chicago, Illinois, USA

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Baja, Mexico

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Jamaica

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9.07.2011

The Ancestral Home (12/20/10)

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I. am. not. playin'--take it in the face, Jet Lag--I'm up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; today we visit the rural township of Jia4xi3, where my mom was raised (by wolves). I guess technically, it's not either my nor my mother's ancestral home, since we "belong" to her husband's/my father's side of the family now.

Culturally-speaking.

Patriarchally-speaking.

I don't know what dispensations are made if you're separated/estranged from said husband/father.

Maybe we belong nowhere. It's still a place where a woman's happiness and social status is largely dependent on how many children she has (and by "children," we mean "sons"), and the extended family unit, so where does my mom belong? No husband, a daughter who lives--by choice and necessity--nearly three thousand miles from her, and lost in America.

And me? I'm estranged from my pops, part pigheadedness and long-standing resentment for abandoning me to a mother who over the years became increasingly unhinged. I remember him shouting at my mom in our tiny, one-bedroom apartment that he had no 后代, hou4 dai4, no descendants. Thanks, dad. Twenty-nine, and I haven't seen him since I was sixteen, and this is what I remember of him.

Fun times. What did we have for breakfast?

Typical Taiwanese fare:


Tien2 dou4 jiang1, sweet soy milk, warm;



mien4 xien4 in Mandarin and mi3 sua3, basically "noodle threads," a gloppy noodle soup that tastes a lot better than it looks, brought home from the market in a tin;






two types of da4bing3, translation, "big cookie," ([grin]), slightly sweet, eggy (as I recall), spongy, and chewy;



starfruit--note the shape. It's usually actually star-shaped, but these are chopped up;



and the leftover offal with pickled et cetera from last night.


Then we're off to Jia4xi3, my yi2zhang4--"the non-blood uncle married to my aunt" driving us past Daoist and/or Buddhist temples. I don't know the difference, but the internets tells us that Daoist temples tend to be colorful, so I'm presuming that these ones are Daoist, although the internets also tells us that Daoism has a more or less syncretic relationship to Buddhism.

(P.S. The "d" of Dao is uttered with a softer d sound, with the tongue flattening a little more across the roof of the mouth than the "d" of den, dick, and dog, the combination of which has the makings of a very NSFW Youtube vid. No, I wouldn't. Yes, I would. No, really, I wouldn't. But maybe.)




Stunning, ain't they? Like, not stunning in terms of a Rothko or Taylor Kitsch, but there's something so exuberant, so insistent about the color and sheer quantity of carvings.



Who is that lady praying to? It ain't Jesus H. Christ, that's for gotdamn sure.


And then, at last. My mom used to transport us on a motor scooter from my paternal grandparents' place, where dutiful daughters-in-law go to be tortured, in 花坛, or Hua4tan3, meaning "flower bed" (ain't that pretty?) to visit my maternal grandparents. I have memories--or maybe just memories of photographs, more like--of when I was a toddler, strapped to her back or standing between her legs.

We drive into the courtyard to be greeted by relatives--I don't catch the exact nature of the kinship. The center of the compound, as you walk in, houses the family shrine, and into I go, maybe trampling on all sorts of religious etiquette, with my camera, but no one seems to be horrified, so...I think I'm in the clear.




Trying to imagine the decades of 拜拜, bai4bai4, or worship/prayer/"bowing with palms together" this room has seen.



Apparently, the back of this document has the names of all the fam dating back for generations. You get your name written in it after you die, and I believe there's a space on it for women, too, though I imagine only women "belonging" to the family, that is, not women who marry out. Alas, the document is only opened on auspicious days as determined by a fortuneteller, and today, it ain't that.


It seems the left wing of the compound is abandoned now, but in the room where my grandparents used to sleep on a raised, hard platform--you know, straight out of like, The Good Earth, is their photograph, and--


for fuck's sake:


photos of me that my mom had given 'em, of me as a toddler and then a grade schooler--top two and bottom on the left, top and bottom on the right. It's eerie and heartbreaking and soul-warming all at the same time. I grew up so isolated from any sense of family aside from my vicariously diagnosed, borderline personality disordered mother, and so what understanding of the concept of family I've constructed for myself is beyond fucked. Never before the sense that people came before you, and that people care about each other just because they share DNA. (Is okay; I'm in therapy.)

This is the outside of the house:


That main door to the right of the car is the door to the family shrine--which is consistent with the belief that the main door is reserved for the gods to enter, since ancestors are essentially family gods.


It looks kinda decent, don't it?

In actuality:


Look, a toil-er, or is it show-let? I'm pretty sure people bathed right next to the toilet. What the feezy? Thass old school ghetto.

 

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