When You're the Only One Punished

When I was a kid, I don't recall having a specific bedtime but I know that at some point, I was supposed to be in bed / asleep.  Being the youngest, I was obviously supposed to go to bed before everyone else, and oftentimes, bedtime was before or while good television was still on!

Just to set up the geography in the house, all the rooms branched off a main hallway.  The room I shared with my sisters was on one end of the hallway, so if I was standing at the end of my hallway, my room was to my left.  A little bit forward to the right was an entryway to the living room, and through that, to the front door.  A little past the living room entrance on the right, my brother's room was to the left.  A little past his room also on the left was the bathroom.  On the right directly across from the bathroom was the kitchen and dining room.  And my parents' bedroom was just after those, at the other end of the hallway from my room.

I remember one night, I think I was maybe 6 or 7, I was still out in the living room with my siblings watching TV.  My parents had gone to bed, and I had either said I was going to bed or had come back out after they'd gone to bed.  My siblings were watching a comedy and laughing.  Not softly laughing, regular laughing.  That was also a reason why having an earlier bedtime was difficult.  I already had trouble sleeping as a kid, and having people laugh at a regular volume nearby was not going to help me to fall asleep or stay asleep.

At some point, I heard my parents' bedroom door open.  I figured the laughing had woken them up or kept them awake.  I knew I'd probably be in trouble, so I got up to go to the bathroom and then head to my room.  My father came out, and he was angry.  As I walked past him, he hit me, hard enough to knock me into the wall.  I don't remember where he hit me.  I remember that it hurt, physically.  I don't remember that it was what I expected.  I figured he'd yell at me or something, which is why I was sort of trying to duck past him.  Yeah, that didn't work.  I did continue on to the bathroom, crying.

I stayed in there for a few minutes, and then I heard my mother saying something to my father about "are you trying to kill her?", and I guess she persuaded him to go back into their room and shut the door.  I heard a clang of some sort but didn't know what it was.  My sister was knocking on the door, telling me it was ok and to let her in.  Shortly afterward, I did.  She came in to check that I wasn't hurt, and she did seem upset about what had happened.  I went to bed after that.

The next day, I think after my father had left for work, I had to go into the bathroom that was attached to my parents' bedroom to get something.  And I saw what had made the clang I'd heard the night before.  It was kind of like a wooden brick, a think slab of wood that I think we used as a door stop for the sliding glass door in the dining room.  I think I figured out that after I went into the bathroom, my father had gone to get that and was waiting for me to come out of the bathroom.  That's when my mother saw him and made the comment she did.  She must have taken it from him and tossed it in the bathroom.  If I had come out of the bathroom sooner, I'm guessing he would have hit me with it.

And with regard to my mother's comment to him of "are you trying to kill her?"  I don't recall her sounding mad or outraged.  It was very matter of fact, a little exasperated, like "don't be ridiculous".  She never came to check on me.  I'm not even sure if she knew that he'd hit me.  I don't remember how much noise I was making while crying, so I don't know if she knew about that either.  I never saw her come out of their room.

As I said, I don't think it had crossed my mind that he'd hit me, just that I'd get yelled at.  Or maybe a slap on the butt or something?  I don't know.  I was definitely not expecting to be hit hard enough for the blow to push me against the wall.  It wasn't a very broad hallway, enough for two people to walk past each other.  I don't know if his hitting me hurt more or if hitting the wall with my shoulder (?) or head (?) hurt more.  I know that I've witnessed violence between my parents on several occasions when I was a kid, but I don't remember if it was before or after this.

I know that I wasn't laughing that loudly.  It wasn't me that they heard.  It was my siblings laughing at normal volume that woke them up / prevented them from going to sleep.  While I wasn't supposed to be out there, my presence in the living room was not what was interfering with their sleep.  And yet, as far as I know, I was the only one punished.  I don't think my father ever went into the living room.  I was walking past him in the hallway when he hit me.  I was crying but I don't recall hearing him say anything to my siblings as I headed towards the bathroom.  I don't remember what happened after I went to bed, whether my siblings stayed in the living room watching TV or whether they stopped.  I think my oldest sister put me to bed, but other than that, there was no comfort or reassurance after what happened.

Language Issues

My parents weren't very good at English, so while the kids would speak to each other in English, we would speak to them in Chinese for the most part. My knowledge of spoken Chinese is limited in that I was born in Hong Kong, and our family moved to the States just after I turned 3, so my Chinese was learned only from what my family spoke to me. I remember that as we grew up, my parents were often irritated when we the kids spoke English to each other, especially when it was something that didn't involve my parents so it wasn't like they needed to understand what we were saying.  They would have wanted us to speak Chinese at home all the time, which would have severely limited what conversations I could have.  I probably had the vocabulary of an elementary school kid when it came to Chinese?  The example I often used is that I wouldn't know words like "auditorium" in Chinese, but I could say "the big building where people gather to do things", which would generally get my point across. I was living in the States, going to an English-speaking school, so it would seem to me to make sense that I was learning a lot more English, and it wasn't like there was a concerted effort to necessarily teach me Chinese other than what I learned listening to everyone talk around the house.  Occasionally, my parents would use a word I didn't know, and I would ask them what it meant. Sometimes I'd remember and sometimes I wouldn't, depending on how often they used the word.

I remember at one point, my father used a word, and I didn't know what it meant, so I asked him. And he got angry because I didn't know this word for a very common thing. It showed how much I didn't know enough Chinese, he said. Well, my parents spoke a different dialect than my siblings and I did. My parents usually spoke our dialect, so that's what I'd learned.  Sometimes, they'd  speak their own dialect, and I learned some of those words as well. But in this case, my father had used the word for "ice", but he'd said it in his dialect instead of the dialect I knew. The word in his dialect and in my dialect sound completely different (for example, the word in his dialect was more like "bat" but the word in my dialect was more like "shoe"), so it's not like you could guess what it was because it sounded similar, and he'd said it in some way where the context didn't give you any idea what the word meant. I'd literally never heard him use that word before, which I told him, but that didn't matter, he was still mad at me.

Both of my parents, but moreso my mother, often lamented the fact that I couldn't read or write Chinese. All of my siblings could to some degree (the next oldest from me, a brother, was 9 when we moved to the States, so he would have already had some schooling in Chinese). I'd had none. My mother would often mention that there were Chinese classes in Chinatown and then voice her disappointment that I never took any, especially if the child of one of her friends (or rivals) at work did take a class.

Of course, there was never any mention of exactly how I was supposed to get to a class. From where we lived, it would take maybe half an hour by car to get to Chinatown. I was clearly not old enough to drive. My father worked weekends, so he couldn't take me. My mother didn't know how to drive. There was no way that my siblings were going to drive me. Was I supposed to get on a bus that would take however long to get there and back? I think my mother started harping on me about the classes starting from when I was in Junior High School, which I guess is called Middle School now. She'd come home from work and tell me how this person or that person was talking about their son or daughter going to Chinese school and I wasn't. And if I asked, it always turned out that they lived in Chinatown and could walk to class on a Saturday.

And it's not like my mother got the information about classes and then tried to work out with me how it could happen. I only knew that there were classes being held somewhere in Chinatown. I didn't know when or how much they cost. And it wasn't like there was the internet readily available in those days to look that kind of information up.

Mind you, none of my siblings took any additional Chinese classes once we got to the States. I don't recall her ever telling my next oldest sibling, the brother who is 6 years older than me, that he should go to Chinese school. So I got chastised for not going to classes that I didn't really have a way to get to, that would have cost money that I'm not sure they would have been ok with paying (we didn't have a lot of extra money for non-necessities), and that no other kid in the family had been expected to go to. Whenever the subject came up, even as I got older, if I mentioned that I had no real way of getting there, that was dismissed as just an excuse.

I am Not My Brother's Keeper

With my oldest siblings out of the house, it was just my brother and me left in the house with my parents. I keep trying to work out how old I was based on the memories I have. I think I was 17 or so, and my brother is 6 years older than me. It had to be on Saturdays because my mother worked on Saturdays, but my brother did not. My mother would come into my room on Saturday mornings before she went to work, and she'd wake me up and tell me whatever she wanted to tell me. And usually, she was irritated because I was still in bed, on a Saturday morning when I didn't have school, I guess. I'm half asleep, trying to understand and remember whatever it was she was telling me. Oftentimes, she would tell me things that she wanted my brother to do, and I was the one who was supposed to tell him.

I cannot for the life of me remember why she didn't just tell him. Maybe he wasn't home for some reason? Maybe he'd been out the night before so he was still asleep and apparently, it was ok for him to be asleep and not woken up, but somehow, I was the one who needed to be woken up to be told what HE was supposed to do that day.

It could be a particular chore she wanted him to do, or something different she wanted taken care of. Whatever it was, it wasn't something I could do, or at least it would require both of us to do it. So I'd have to remember whatever she told me, as I went back to sleep for a bit after she left, and then later, after my brother woke up, I would tell him what our mother had said for him to do. These were probably things he wasn't keen on doing anyway because they were chores of some kind. But can you imagine how happy he was to be told by his six-years-younger sister what chores he had to do on a Saturday instead of whatever else he might have wanted to do, because it wasn't like there had been any warning or notice ahead of time that our mother had wanted him to do these things.

And the day would wear on, and I'd tell him again about the things our mother wanted him to do. How keen do you think he was about that? There was no way that I was going to be able to make my six-years-older-than-me brother do something he didn't want to do, even if it was something our mother wanted.

And then he might go out on a Saturday night before our mother got home from work. And he might have done one of the things she wanted but not everything or maybe even none of it. And I would be the one to get in trouble. I'd get scolded because things hadn't been done. I'd tell her that I told him, but that never mattered. I mean, I never got punished for it, but it was clear that she was unhappy, and she voiced it, and I was the one who had to deal with it.

It wasn't like she never told him directly when she wanted him to do something. But on the many occasions when she would tell me to tell him, and he didn't do it, I don't recall a single time when she was angry or irritated with him that it wasn't done. She was either ok with it, or she'd be mad at me. I had zero control over whether or not the thing was done, but somehow, it was my fault for not being able to get him to do it.

What's For Dinner?

A lot of people have had to make a lot of changes to their lives because of the current pandemic, and most people are spending a lot more time at home. I'm fortunate in that I've been able to work from home, so that's one adjustment that's been relatively easy to manage. One of the major changes that have come out of being home pretty much all of the time is that I'm doing much more cooking than I used to. Because of the hours I was keeping at work, as well as the commute time that was terrible, as is common in the Los Angeles area, I wouldn't get home until much later in the evening, so for the most part, the husband and I handled our meals on our own, except for weekends. And even then, cooking has never been my thing. It's no secret that I'm fond of food and am interested in food-related subjects, but I don't generally find the pleasure in cooking that a lot of other people do. Well, I like watching it, but I'm not as interested in doing it. Other people are much better at it, so why not take advantage of that.

Because I have more time now, I generally do some sort of cooking maybe twice a week. On other days, we might do take-out or leftovers or simpler things from the pantry or refrigerator. My form of cooking is currently very simple and mostly consists of Chinese cuisine. I'll admit that I never really learned to cook, which is why I can only do fairly simple things. I was never taught to cook as a child. Being the youngest of five kids, I was tasked with the simple jobs, which usually consisted of washing things. As I got older, I would sometimes be allowed to prep or cut certain vegetables but really only if it was easy. When it came to actual cooking, I was rarely given the chance. Occasionally, I would get to stir something, but otherwise, my parents were too impatient to actually teach me or let me do stuff because it would take too long to explain it. Even when I'd ask, they might let me do it for a little while, but in explaining what kind of seasoning to add or how long to cook something at any particular stage in the process, they would usually get tired of explaining and waiting and just take over. End of lesson. The stuff I taught myself to cook when I lived on my own were pretty simple, and there's not much incentive to learn to cook more when you're just cooking for one. And, as I mentioned, cooking really isn't my thing, so there wasn't much of a drive to teach myself more.

My mother would often lament my lack of ability to cook. How was I going to catch a husband if I couldn't cook for him? Because that's apparently all I'm good for. Because a grown man isn't expected to be able to feed himself, but it's my responsibility to make sure he's fed? And, if it really was so vital for me to be able to cook in order to snag a husband, wouldn't you think it would be fairly important for my parents to teach me that essential skill? Yeah, there was never an answer when I would bring that up. It was my fault that I didn't know how to cook because no one taught me.

So when I cook now, some of it is experimenting with regard to what things go well together, how long to cook things, seasonings, and the like. The husband happens to like Chinese cooking, but some of the things I've made for him are things he's not really familiar with, so my advantage is that he doesn't know how the dish is *supposed* to turn out. He doesn't know if I made it "wrong" - he can only go by what the finished product looks and tastes like. He's not particularly forthcoming with his feedback, so I have to ask specific questions to find out what he likes and what he doesn't. If there's something he isn't fond of, I either don't use that ingredient the next time or I use less of it. I know there are certain things and tastes that he does like, so I can take that into account. Occasionally, I'll make something because I want it, even if it's not something he's keen on. Those nights, he figures out dinner on his own, and he's fine with that.

I'm looking at recipes and things to try to branch out into non-Chinese cuisine, partly because it gets repetitive cooking and eating the same things when you're having every meal at home. For those things, the husband will obviously have more familiarity with how they're supposed to be made, but he seems pretty flexible.