gift...what gift?

When I told Luca that I was going, he looked at his dad and said, "so, it'll be just the boys for two weeks."

Well, there's his nonna next door whom I checked with before I made the decision. Having a grandparent nearby is really a boon and something that Luca takes for granted (I tell him all the time), but he does miss her when she's away. The boys will be just fine with nonna's home-cooking!

I'm leaving February 16. After my dad arranged my ticket (we're on the same flight), I thought: I can't embarrass my dad. I've got to bone up on Taiwanese culture, so I went surfing the Net. When I read it is customary to bring a gift to the host, I also remembered I needed to bring something to my grandfather - it is his 100th birthday after all. So, I called my dad who told me that I didn't have to bring anything and that he was planning to give a red envelope of money (which is also customary). Well, I wanted to give something else, too.


When I found out that my grandfather used to follow Taiwanese baseball (the national sport), I came up with the idea to get him a baseball jersey customized with the name TSAO and the number 99. But then I discovered that there had been a professional baseball player named Tsao who was even picked up by the Los Angeles Dodgers for a season and who played for the CPBL until he was expelled for his involvement in game-fixing. Not knowing whether my grandfather was the type of person who would find that amusing or shameful, I decided to go with the second idea of a digital picture frame.

Man, I hate buying electronics. Too many choices! What features do I need? Do I go for the brand? What's my budget? Do I get the one on sale? Whether I'm in the store or surfing the Internet, I find shop comparison time-consuming and confusing. After narrowing the choices down to three, I ended up making an eenie meenie minie mo gut selection. Then later, I found out that the frame I purchased didn't have a feature I actually do need. Back to the store to the returns/exchange counter.

Anyway, my idea is to fill the picture frame with photos of himself, his family, his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, so that he could see how many people he's responsible for bringing into the world. He has four children, eleven grandchildren and thirteen great grandchildren. Not a huge number, but still, something to be proud of, I would think.

Thanks to e-mail, scanners, and editing tools, I'm able to contact my family and cousins across the country and across the world, get old and current photos from them, organize and add dates to the photos, all in good time for my departure.

I just need to get the right digital frame!

swimming pool vs Taiwan

When I was 11 years old, my parents in a surprising act of democracy gave me, my older sister and my younger brother a choice. We could choose between taking the whole family to Taipei, Taiwan (which would have been my first time) to meet our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins OR getting a swimming pool. As the tie-breaker, I voted for the pool. I think (now with shame) I even jumped up and down as I shrieked “a pool! a pool!”

Well, what can I say? I was eleven and not really interested in exploring my roots. Later, when I was a university student doing the backpacking thing, I still wasn't that interested. Instead, I traveled the other direction to Europe, tried living in Scotland for three years and later in Italy, for another three. My parents went to Taiwan fairly regularly (about every five years), my brother went there a couple of times and my sister, after graduation, spent a month touring with our mother in Taiwan and China.

I have never met any of my grandparents. My maternal grandparents died early on. But, my 99 year-old grandfather, my aunts, uncles, and cousins are still bopping around over there. Over there. Taiwan was always a place both familiar and foreign. So too are the relatives living there – familiar faces in photos and yet foreign at the same time. My mandarin is pretty limited although I can understand a fair bit. In my head, I have this picture of sitting in a room with my relatives and not really connecting in any way. I can also see them thinking Wendy is more waigoren (foreigner) than Chinese- which is true.

I am a Canadian. I was born in Ottawa and grew up in small towns in Quebec; I was often one of only two Chinese kids in the whole school (my sister was the other one). I don`t speak much Mandarin, I`ve never been to Asia and I don`t know much about Chinese culture except what it`s like to grow up with Chinese parents and their expectations.


When I was young, my father used to tell me that if he took me to Taiwan, I wouldn’t even have to say a word, people there would see right away that I wasn’t a local. It was the way I moved and laughed - like a North American. That was fine by me. Even if it bugged my mother to no end. She was always nagging me to act sweeter and be more gentle and smile prettily. That only made me more determined to be a Canadian tomboy, joining in WWF matches with neighbourhood boys in the front yard.

Of course, there was a lot of other stuff that kept me from wanting to go East and meet some relatives and embrace my heritage. But, sometime last year, I started looking at all this stuff and I found it was a lot like looking at my early, badly drawn pictures; why the heck am I holding onto them? When my father told me he was planning to go back to Taiwan to celebrate my grandfather's 100th birthday, he never imagined that I would be quietly thinking over the idea. When I told my father that I wanted to go to Taiwan with him, he was shocked and then he laughed.

Am I excited? Yes. Nervous? Oh yeah.

Although I’ve never asked my sister or brother if they remember the pool vs Taiwan decision, I'm pretty sure it doesn't weigh on them as much. They probably don’t remember. And then, I wonder if my parents ever told the folks in Taiwan that one summer, we chose to get a pool over going to Taiwan. It makes me cringe just to think about it. I really hope they don’t remember.