Hu-stravaganza

Finally made it to a Hu family Thanksgiving, after two years of conspicuous absence. I didn’t realize how long it had been since I’d seen my family until they started asking me things like “So, I heard you were teaching!” (I haven’t been in the classroom for a year and a half), started saying things like “You’ve lost weight!” (weight hasn’t changed since Fall 2002, when I was roly poly from a year of living in exerciseless Kathmandu, Delhi, South Bronx) and I vigorously avoiding introducing my platoon of non-Chinese friends because I couldn’t remember the names of my cousins (there’s either two Stephens or two Andrews—which one is it? I think this was an LSAT puzzle). Eventually I remembered everyone’s name and had a bunch of awkward conversations with the cousins with whom I’ve spent almost every Thanksgiving in memory: “You’re in...college?” and “You study...public health?”

To catalogue:

• Grandma, 83, the matriarch from Ningpo in whose house we feasted and watched Chinese historical fantastical soap operas, who taught me the literal and metaphorical Chinese translation of “Thanksgiving” tonight [cue poignant music] as I sat next to her in the corner spooning her rice porridge into my mouth, and her five sons:
• Dà bó [check out my awesome attempt at pinyin, a totally foreign language to someone raised on bopomofo], the oldest uncle, of whom my earliest memory is my mom saying “They have a whole acre of land in Los Altos Hills!” and me subsequently scratching my seven year-old head in consternation at the foreign measurement terminology
• His wife, dà bó mu, a woman who paints neo-Surrealist landscapes that hang up in the living room of her Los Altos Hills home
• Their sons:
• Peter, the oldest cousin, who kept the family gatherings lively for me, Richard, and the others of my generation first in the 1980s by making up Dungeons and Dragons-esque labyrinths on graph paper for us to move characters through, and then in the 1990s by giving us math puzzles (e.g., white hats and suicides on Hatland island) to think about between dinner gorgings. Peter is currently winning the coolest job competition with a plumb FPS video game programming job in Palo Alto.
• Dip, his South Asian-via-West Virginian doctor girlfriend
• Stephen, who is one day younger but got 40 points higher on the SATs than me, who is second place in the coolest job competition with a plumb spot at Google, where apparently the staff is treated to, among other perks, a volleyball court. Stephen has grown his hair out and is also growing a short goatee. The exact words his mother used to describe this weird phenomenon were “yang fa,” which means not to grow hair but to nurture it into existence, like an herb garden; then his mother said that Stephen’s next move in the growing-things-on-his-face plan was to “yang bí tì,” or nurture snot until it hung in tendrils down his face. My fourth uncle asked him how long the “Jesus Christ Superstar” act was going to last.
• Alan, a senior at Berkeley who tells me, fingers crossed, that he doesn’t know how to read but wants to be a lawyer
• èr bó, my dad’s second older brother, a really funny skinny dude, of whom my earliest memory is him doing twenty-five pull-ups without stopping on the chin-up bar in the hallway to the kitchen (which I eventually broke with an acrobatic flourish in 1996)
• His wife, èr bó mu, whose name is “Sue Hu”
• Their son, Anthony, the youngest cousin who I barely know whose birth was preceded by much hand-wringing re: his parents’ fecundity. I was to “tutor” him in “English,” not the language but the art, while I was in high school and he was in middle school, but that never panned out and now I don’t know him at all.
• My dad, the spry middle guy in the Hu family tree, who told me on my wedding night how his father was an abusive gambler who sent him (and only him, among the five sons) away to live with strange relatives in Kaohsiung when he was eight because he was so disliked by his father, who begins stories by saying things like “there was a Chinese guy with a Ph.D. who drove his car off a cliff in Yosemite and they didn’t find him for three days,” who taught me the meaning of improper sleep patterns and who comes to my room when I’m working bearing cubed Korean pear bits so that I won’t starve in front of the computer screen
• His wife, my mom, who I so stupidly and misogynistically dismissed for so many years as a hysterical worrier but who has stunned me a thousand times over with her perspicacity and sensitivity, who is also a really great cook and a person whose happiness I want to preserve at all costs
• Her sister, my aunt, a yí, who looks exactly like my mom except about fifteen pounds skinnier, a retired high school teacher/administrator who just this year moved to the Peninsula while her husband and two kids remain in Taiwan (they’re not separated, she’s just the first to cast her line to America)
• NOT Richard, my older brother, who is finishing his second year of dental school at U. of Sydney in Australia with his Taiwanese-Australian girlfriend Aimee in tow, who is also 5’3” and really into FPS video games
• A fumbly, malodorous, perpetually disaffected homunculus named Mandy who can’t ever seem to find a comfortable place to put her hands or the right anecdote for the occasion
• My life pardner Laura, possibly the most virtuous human being who hasn’t been sainted, radio producer extraordinaire, triathlete, well-coifed androgyne, Scrabble champ (at least one of every three times), all around nice guy who instructed all the interested cousins tonight on the function of “royal jelly” in beehive maintenance
• My college pal Deepa, a new Californian, an intrepid and prize-winning education reporter for the renowned Sacramento Bee, a siren with a siren song, a fluent Tamil speaker with whom I once rode un-A/C’d night trains in Kerala looking for the lentil cutlet monger or the statues of Kannyakumari, whatever comes first, who tonight added “Grotesticles” to the line of erotic cereals we’re scheming, which includes “Fellati-Os,” “Cunniling-clusters,” and “Penis Flakes”
• My college pal Bernadine, the former “hooker” and captain of the Radcliffe Rugby squad, a fireplug whose laugh coaxes even grumps to laugh, who came from Oakland bearing a huge box of “Korean” pears that later elicited a lengthy discussion comparing “Asian” to “Korean” to non-Asian/Korean pears (presumably the former two are better at math?), who played four hands piano with me today using pieces Mozart wrote at age six for two baby hands, who also looked at a picture me sweatshirt-clad on the piano from 1995 and declared that I looked like “Jabba the Hutt”
  

• Her college pal Sam, a Deep Springs guy (the designation sticks for life, I think) who wore double-kneed Carhartts and a backpack with hiking boots dangling from the bottom (for the Yosemite hike tomorrow) and a pair of orange boxers of an indeterminate pattern (Deepa: “Pumpkins? Shark bites?”)
• sì shū shu, the fourth brother, the only person whose family lives in Los Angeles, the last brother to stop smoking, the guy who accused Stephen #1 of looking like Jesus Christ Superstar
• His wife, sì shěn shen, someone with whom I studiously avoided conversing because I am not confident enough in my Chinese to communicate nuance and I was afraid I would have to
• Their daughter, Jen, a Stanford grad with a masters in English who commutes to the Peninsula from San Francisco to teach English to spoiled brats at a private school in Palo Alto, whose politics are more closely aligned with mine than anyone else in the family. She said tonight, “It’s just us cousins here, plus significant others and boyfriends, they come and go, etc.”
• Her younger brother Stephen #2, a junior studying who knows what at Berkeley, who seemed really interested in bees tonight, who when asked why there were two “Stephens” in this generation of the Hu family said, “Dunno, I think my mom was playing mahjong when I was born and she just said, ‘Oh! Um—“Stephen”—whatever!’”
• xiao shū shu, the youngest brother with the second largest head (after my dad), of whom my earliest memory is petting his twin terriers in his Fremont home
• xiao shěn shen, his wife, who is extremely young-looking and beautiful despite being nearly fifty, about whom my grandmother told me, “She looks young because she exercises a lot. She does group dancing—and they travel overseas together. They took a cruise to three Mexican islands last year!”
• Their daughter Alice, a junior at Berkeley, who is taking her MCATs in April in order to do a M.D. with a public health focus in order to work in a clinic or for Doctors Without Borders, or something, she says, to whom I mailed Beloved and Dharma Bums right before I left for college in an effort to expose her to the right half of the human brain for fear that she was turning into a left-half kind of Hu, who sat on the floor of the living room tonight and made funny remarks about the historical fantastical Chinese soap opera that was running on the widescreen TV all night
• Her brother Andrew, who must be in high school now, maybe in his first year of college, who the hell knows?

In other words, a massive Hu gathering, with friends and more. I would enumerate our numerous dishes but I’ve exhausted my capacity for outlining, what with my above participant list and the three minutes of Contracts outlining I managed today. After the festivities, me, Sam, Laura, Bernie and Deepa walked the half block back to my parents’ house where we sat on the only sit-able piece of furniture in the whole damn freezing place (my bed, eliciting my dad’s “We should get a bigger bed!” comment) and told jokes about girls named Eileen and guys named Skip and told stories about teachers name-called “Princess Wrinkles” and guys who threatened to chop preachers with axes in Washington Square Park. All in all, not too shabby.