20 Years Ago…
Our family moved from Taipei, Taiwan to Queens, New York… I still remember the first night we spent here after the long plane ride. I was only five.
My grandfather came to JFK to pick us up in a white Oldsmobile. He was very excited and began talking non-stop. I got to sit in between him and my father in the front seat while we drove to somewhere in Queens… I want to say Jackson Heights. My next memory was the following morning when I woke up and wanted to watch TV. The tiny apartment had a very old TV and after my dad set it up for me, I sat down across the room to watch. I noticed that the picture had black spots and they were moving! I walked up to take a closer look and they were cockroaches… big ugly crawling cockroaches. Turns out the entire apartment was infested with them and luckily we only had to stay there for a week. But still that week made a lasting impression on us… to the tune of five years when the cockroaches followed us to every place we moved in to. We finally got rid of them after moving for the third time.
It’s hard to imagine that 20 years has passed and when I look back through the progression of events that carried us to this day, I can’t help but shake my head and laugh at the culture shocks we’ve encountered. I’ll attempt to list some here:
- Giving boxes of eggrolls to friends as a birthday present.
- Giving teenage mutant ninja turtle underwear as a birthday present (thankfully this only happened once).
- Three families living in the same house for two years.
- Taking pictures with a neighborhood limosine because a stretch limo was the coolest thing.
- Wrapping leek and pork dumplings and taking them to work while co-workers wonder what the strange odor is.
- Being picked up from elementary school by our grandfather screaming our names in Chinese in case we didn’t hear him.
- Wanting a pair of Reebok Pumps because all the kids had them.
- Conflicting Little League and Chinese School Saturday mornings. Learning Chinese is important.
- Learning how to kick a shuttlecock, play Chinese chess, write Caligraphy, Chinese yo-yo, Speed dictionary were also important.
- The eating and food on the car during family trips.
- “On the car”, “Close the lights”, “Give them a little color see-see”
Despite the list, I can honestly say that we’re pretty normal compared to the average American family now. We’ve definitely Americanized quite a bit. But, there are times when culture shock still hits… we just try to file that away for moments when we’ll embarass each other. Or when friends joke about dumping a bucket of water on us, throwing us on the beach, and calling immigration about five suspicious looking asians, we would have evidence why we’d be deported.
