Whew, this blog has collected a lot of dust since I last checked in, and I might cheat by making a few predated posts. The start of 2010 has been a long haul. In early January, before the dust had even settled in my whirlwind of MFA applications, one of my aunts had a stroke.
It was torture seeing her in the hospital, where she was poked, prodded, x-rayed, scanned, injected, tied down, intubated, and medicated for four weeks before the doctors told us there was basically nothing more they could do. We finally took my aunt to hospice (where I would rather have brought her two weeks earlier), and she passed away two and half days later, holding my hand.
She was my second mother, really. I like to say that my immigrant mother was the one who disciplined me into being a good Chinese girl and my American-born aunt was the one who spoiled me silly with cotton candy and ice cream, trips to the circus, and too many presents at Christmas. It was a gift to spend her last days with her.
At one point I read her excerpts from Denise Chavez’s Taco Testimony, a memoir with recipes, and I told my aunt, who loved cooking tamales and tacos and couldn’t cook Chinese food at all, that I one day wanted to write a book like this, a memoir encompassing the Chinese and quasi-Mexican palate of my upbringing.
I’ve been saying this for ten years. It’s time to get it done.
