While I’m on the topic of weird, in-between places, I might as well mention something else that happened during Thanksgiving weekend.

On Friday, I attended my high school’s 5-year reunion. It was held in the relatively quiet downstairs space of a pub in Harvard Square, which was probably the only reason I attended at all. (For the proximity, I mean, not the fact that it was at Tommy Doyle’s, which I would never go to by choice.) I arrived 45 minutes late, to a room of five people with whom I had exchanged roughly ten passing words throughout all four years of high school, and left 45 minutes later, just as the old cliques began to arrive in waves. Only one of my high school friends attended the reunion, and her arrival unfortunately coincided with my departure. (I actually had a train to catch, which I barely made.) She was the only person I hugged, with a genuine, back-crunching embrace. But we exchanged maybe six words.

My memories of my classmates had morphed fairly accurately into realistic expectations for their post-college selves, thanks to Facebook idling and the occasional grapevine-picking. Everyone looked and acted largely the same, at least to me. A had become shmoozier, yes, but he was also now the CEO of his own company and one of those guys with his social media-verse synced up to broadcast his every move. B was a paralegal and diplomatically expressed her discontent with her apple-pie smile. C was living at home and driving his parents insane. No big surprises. But I’m almost certain that not one of them recognized me, except for the one friend who made a belated appearance.

Of course, most of us believe that we change, or can change. We mature, gain perspective, acquire social graces and good taste. Maybe we learn how to dress ourselves and apply makeup, or say “fuck it” and toss away our dress shoes for good. Uniquely, I had spent most of high school wanting to be someone else, and after a few semesters of confused floundering in college, discovered that I didn’t need to. I clung to and kicked at my geeky Asian identity in a 98% white suburb, where my parents didn’t attend a single town meeting (nor have any clue when they occurred) and Friday nights were permitted for movies with my female friends, as long as the SATs weren’t right around the corner.

I’m certain that I wasn’t the only person at my reunion who’d traded glasses for contacts and learned to inhabit her awkwardness. (It’s only the subject of every shitty rom-com ever made.) It’s likely that my hyper-sensitivity to my classmates’ blank registration of my appearance — not one person said, “Hello, Connie!”, only enthusiastic “How are you?!“‘s — is evidence that I haven’t completely said “fuck it” to everything, that I still care somewhat about whether or not I ever existed in the isolated world of the WHS teenage social existence. I’d like to ascribe it to something more sublime, but frankly, it won’t make a lick of difference. Embrace your differences, as they say. Sometimes you really do just want a bite of cranberry sauce with your dumplings.

Or, Ramblings on Interstitial Spaces, Part 1/2.

From 12 o’clock, roughly clockwise: Chinese collard green (don’t know the proper English name), pork chop, prawn, salmon, turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, marinated roast beef, xian bing, sauteed green beans, julienned jellyfish with cucumber, [yellow?]fish with celery and tofu, seaweed salad.

This was one of two coma-inducing Thanksgiving dinners I consumed at the end of November, during the short holiday. (The delicious, stomach-expanding meal in the picture above was demolished chez ma petite soeur, vraiment.)

I realized only after eating, while melting into the living room sectional, that both dinners were a bit strange and very un-American. Giant platters of Chinese banquet dishes (chicken feet, sliced jellyfish, dumplings, to name the more prosaic offerings) were laid out buffet-style at the house of each Chinese-American host, eclipsing the puny bowls of turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce. (At one house, the stuffing was of a distinctly Chinese variation — sticky rice with dried fruits, nuts and tofu.) Dessert consisted of assorted chocolate cakes, tiramisu, fruit trays and store-bought pies from Costco. Many guests (myself among them) took second helpings of cake and tiramisu. Nobody touched the pies.

It’s been a slow unraveling for me, but I’ve only realized over the past few years how easily my Chinese-ness—and that of my fellow Chinese-Americans, even those born in the States—can manifest itself in the most commonplace of situations. When I hung out with my white friends in high school and ate pizza at their houses, or watched The Exorcist in their dens, I ascribed the few differences that I did notice to more obvious factors. Academic parents. Catholic parents. Wealthier parents. Until college, for example, it never occurred to me that Americans ate anything other than gingerbread during Christmas. Despite having grown up in predominantly white New England suburbs, I still didn’t know what a mince pie was—although I was quite fond of PopTarts, at least until I realized that they were disgusting. Even one of the kids with whom I had both Thanksgiving dinners this year—a close family friend born in the States, a college freshman at Cornell who spent his secondary schooling at a New England boarding school—commented that he’d never tried “cranberry jam” before. 

I’ll spare you any pseudo-philosophical, late-night babblings on cultural divide / assimilation, since most of my recent thoughts on the topic have pooled in the realm of the socio-economic but have yet to take any real shape beyond simple commentary.

So here is what I can offer you, however redundant: I can read William Faulkner but not the Chinese newspaper, I can cook risotto but not egg drop soup, and I will quote The Wire at length but fail to understand a rudimentary Chinese pun. Yet I was also raised by a tiger mom and an engineer father who hates cheese, and sometimes you just have to shake your head and laugh when they ask you, for the tenth time since graduating from a school where you didn’t take a single science course, why you don’t see yourself going to med school.