Confessions of a Cat-holic (111)

Rex and I started going out at the beginning of fall. Soon after I celebrated my birthday in September, my relatives from the United States had come all the way to Asia on a tour to showcase the retirement of their tenures. Even though I called them my relatives, reality was that I had never talked to any of them remotely via the phone or mail prior to their Asia tour, let alone seeing them in person. I didn’t even know they existed.

Not sure what wind had blown them towards Asia, a land they would not want to call home. My family was split into half during the civil war in China. My grandpa's side stood with the communist government, while my granduncle's side parted with the capitalist Kuomintang, and eventually immigrated to the states and lived there happily ever after. They were not my only relatives in the states and in North America. On my father's side, I had an uncle (my father's half brother) and a few second cousins in Chicago, one of whose name was "Felicia". (check out the meme "Bye, Felicia") Felicia was a certified vet and she wedded a doctor. They had recently moved to Kansas all the way from Chicago, but she confessed to me that she attempted suicides a few times after conceiving a girl as her first born because her husband was a traditional and old fashioned man who wanted a boy only.

I also knew that they had a wedding in San Francisco and Illinois, because her husband grew up in the Bay Area. Right after her husband's graduation from medical school, they were already celebrating the commencement of their high end life by showing off photos of them sipping a glass of champagne on a yacht. Obviously, they thought that being a surgeon was a guarantee to material success. This was not at all unprecendented, but actually almost universal. All my friends in the new school also celebrated too early, too soon. They were too desperate to show off their newborns and new homes before life brought them a brutal reality check and belated disillusionment.

The thing which I did not quite understand about my relatives overseas was how biased and ignorant they were towards people in other continents. Apparently, Felicia who looked like Joyce Lee, wanted to try out for Hong Kong's beauty pageant when she was younger. Hey, I had another Asian American friend from Columbia, who could not speak a word of Cantonese, said he wanted to become a kungfu star in Asia and he said he was going to make it for sure, just because his father was a native of Hong Kong. What the hell was wrong with these people? What the fuck?! Ungrounded confidence...

So everyone in Hong Kong was a beauty pageant queen and a kungfu star afterall, and nothing else. Everyone could dream as wild and as hard as he wished. Hong Kong was a cradle for fairy tales, in the eyes of a foreign man, anyways.

I grew up in Asia, though. Asia was a competitive continent which taught me to be ultra-secretive, especially to my friends and family, about my likings and things that were worth celebrating, because no one would feel happy for me, if I ever appeared happy.

Growing up reading fictions such as the Chinese Cinderella and the Falling Leaves, I got the idea of what it meant to come from a huge family with parts of it falling and leaving like the book suggested. Even though the text was kind of difficult, given that I was only a teenage girl and not of English as my mother tongue, I understood the metaphors that the books suggested. My relatives from the states were the falling leaves back to its root on a glorious Asia tour upon their retirement. Earlier in life, they had fled to a foreign country and somehow got by alright with a phd and a respectable career. Comparatively speaking, I had to say my family was doing far better than most and it was probably the best they could do, with the belief that America was the world's greatest country.

My relatives in the States were all very white-washed, and they really lived up to the stereotypes of an American Chinese family. My granduncle, Ben Kuo, was a retired professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at UIUC. He already passed away a while ago due to a rare form of blood cancer. Rest in peace, my dear.