dispatch from the asian midwest

dragons, dim sum, sanrio, etc.

CAM International Market, Cincinnati, OH

Once a month, like clockwork, my family packs into our Honda Accord and drives several hours to the nearest city, Cincinnati or Atlanta depending on the year, to take stock of Chinese groceries. It’s one of the rare occasions we all participate in an activity as a family since we never eat meals together at home. Three hours is eternity to a child, so I prepare diligently. At 9, I pack my Nintendo DS lite. At 12, I pack books. By 15, my iPhone is usually enough to keep me occupied.

We leave the house at 9am, timed to arrive at peak dim sum hour. The ride is more or less silent, only punctuated by the radio and wind whooshing through the open car window. I do my best to shrink as much as possible. I slump because the headrest is set at an awkward height and I’m too scared to ask someone to fix it for me. I lean so hard into the door that I practically fall out of the car; breaching the invisible backseat median between me and my older sister could mean conflict which was to be avoided at all costs.

I eventually let whichever NPR show is playing in the background lull me to sleep. My parents are adamant about only playing NPR in the car. I wonder now if they even paid attention to what was playing, but probably not. When the ride is over, I spring out of the car toward the restaurant’s double doors, using all of my anxious energy to tug them open.

Shouting comes from every direction, carts weave between tables like high-speed traffic. The clanging of steamer containers drives the beat of the whole spectacle. A massive, upholstered dragon on the back wall is the production’s centerpiece, staring down at everyone with omniscient dignity. I dream of roaming the banquet hall freely after-hours—no people, no noise, just running my hand against the dragon’s sequins.

The reverie breaks when we sit down to eat. The chairs at the table are too high, leaving my legs flailing around uncomfortably midair. The pearl plastic chopsticks make eating nearly impossible; they’re much less forgiving than the wooden chopsticks we have at home. I fumble with them valiantly until resigning myself to stabbing my food, out of frustration as much as necessity. Ordering is equally painful. I avoid eye contact with servers so they don’t ask me questions that I don’t understand. I shyly point or simply hope that my parents remember what my favorite dishes are; sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

Mealtime niceties and intimate conversation are not our family’s strong suit, but we all solemnly appreciate the ceremony of monthly dim sum. It carries the decorum of a town hall meeting, the only socially acceptable time to make the month’s announcements. “I want to quit piano,” “I don’t want to go to the college you want me to go to,” “I’m dating a man much older than me.” The formality of the meal makes it politically neutral ground. Regardless of what anyone shares, one can’t argue, because we’re in a public establishment and no one wants to ruin the meal we’ve traveled so far to share together. Instead you tightly smile, stare down at your plate, and continue to fiddle with the goddamn chopsticks.

After lunch, we begin checking the items off our CVS receipt-length grocery list. All the large Chinese establishments fit in the span of a single thumbnail-sized strip mall. Their storefronts radiate a beige, all-American spirit, as if to assure passerby “There’s nothing to see here, move on!” The real fun hides behind the frontlines. Through an unassuming alley, an herb shop brims floor-to-ceiling with eerie substances like Solomon’s seal and Astragalus root; a beauty supply store markets youth regenerating elixirs with ingredients banned in America; a plant shed nurses entire forests in fluorescent lighting, inspecting both you and the plants under a giant microscope. 

By the end of the day, I have a migraine from the overwhelming sights and smells. My favorite and final stop comes when my dad and I break off from the group to go to the small, lone bookstore. While he surveys the front displays, I bee-line for the shelf hidden in the back corner. I like to think it was placed there like my own personal secret. The Sanrio shelf carries every 9 year old girl’s dream items. Puffy stickers that always bounce back no matter how many times I poke them. Bunny-embossed bento boxes wrapped in fabric bows. I imagine bringing one to school everyday like a staple accessory, ignoring the fact that I never actually brought lunch from home, opting instead for cafeteria styrofoam trays and paper milk cartons. I inspect the mechanical pencils like rare, black market merchandise. After all, you can only find 0.5 lead pencils here vs. the 0.7 you’d commonly find at American stores. The ones with the bells attached to the end would surely be too loud in class, but the ones with the heart-shaped erasers seem too childish. Even though I appreciated their charm, I also wanted people to take me seriously.

The shelf feels colossal in my memory, but upon reflection it was a pretty pitiful excuse for a shelf; you could probably scan its entire inventory in less than five minutes. But the silly little trinkets were comforting. These routine trips always left me with an unnerving feeling of insincerity. I visually blended into the background; I savored the food and shopped for groceries with dutiful muscle memory. But I still fumbled with the words and the practices. I grew up fulfilling the bare minimum for authenticity. I went to Chinese school on Sundays, but stopped going after throwing an epic temper tantrum in the third grade. I had plenty of Chinese friends, but couldn’t hold conversations with their parents. I never internalized the parables and poems, the order of the Zodiac animals. I didn’t know the dates of holidays by heart. My parents rarely talked about their relationship to Taiwan, where they had emigrated from in the ‘80s to get their graduate degrees. Despite my efforts, my performance never felt entirely convincing, to other people or to myself. I worried that if anyone inspected me too closely, they would be able to tell I was a fake.

And so every month, like clockwork, I returned to the Sanrio shelf in search of solace, to confess my fears and secrets. To the plushie toys, I prayed that next month, I would feel different. At least the inanimate cartoon animals couldn’t judge me—cuteness transcends language anyway, right? 

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thank you to Santi for patiently working with me to find the right words

thank you to June and Austin for always indulging my mixed thoughts about being Asian American

you all make me better