I wake up at odd hours every day.
3am is normal.
4am feels slightly better.
5am and I think, my gosh, I actually slept well.
I’ve always been like this.
Not 3am as a child — but early. Five. Six. Before the house fully woke up. Before the day had expectations.
Back then, mornings were for video tapes.
We only had three channels. If we wanted foreign content, we had to rent it. That meant going to the video store, scanning plastic covers, hoping the good ones weren’t already gone. Content wasn’t streaming into our lives. It had to be chosen, carried home, inserted.
Japanese shows. Cartoons. Wrestling.
Doraemon
Fist of the North Star
Ken Shimura
The tapes included everything — even the commercials.
I liked the commercials.
One that stayed with me was a curry commercial. A mother showing her love to her perfect family by making beef curry for dinner. The father smiling. The kids excited. Steam rising from the pot.
I told my mom I wanted curry too.
She happily obliged, with a few tweaks.
We didn’t eat beef at home, so she switched it to pork. Instead of potatoes, she used daikon, sometimes bamboo. We just didn’t eat a lot of potatoes.
It didn’t look like the one on TV.
But to me, that was curry.
Fast forward to the U.S.
We were renting video tapes again. This time, it was more for my parents. They were catching up on shows from Taiwan.
包青天.
倚天屠龍記.
愛在他鄉.
I remember watching them together. More dialogue. Slower pacing. Different humor.
That was how my Chinese kept up.
Not through classes. Just by sitting there.
By the summer I graduated high school, my father decided to move back to San Francisco.
He doesn’t do well in cold weather. He fell a couple of times when it snowed in New York. After that, he was convinced he would fall and die in a New York winter.
So he moved.
I stayed.
I was going to NYU.
He left us the apartment in Flushing. My mom was going to stay with me for a few months before I’d be on my own.
A week before college started, my mom got a call from Taiwan. Her father — my grandpa — had passed away.
I still remember the way she cried.
I didn’t console her.
I didn’t know how.
She booked the first flight back to Taipei.
Before she left, she cooked me a big pot of curry so I’d have something to eat when I get back from school. I didn’t know how to cook then.
The pot sat in the fridge. I would heat some up each day. Pork instead of beef. No potatoes. The way she always made it.
I didn't know how to take care of myself, I didn't know how to cook, I don't know how I made it through college.
My current go-to boxed curry version is beef with carrots, no potatoes. That’s my standard.
Recently, I’ve been trying to turn the boxed version into something closer to the Japanese hotel breakfast style. I think I’ve cracked it. This one was so good that Barb ate it two days in a row. Do you know how rare that is?
New curry is darker, richer, a lot more aromatic. As the saying goes once you go black, you don’t go back to box curry
I think I’ll keep tweaking and evolving it until I find a version I can settle on as my own.
We don’t have videotapes to bond over with Justin. He has everything at his fingertips now — Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, video games, you name it. We’ve had to limit screen time because we can see how addictive it is. The other day Justin was basically a crackhead. He was willing to practice piano for two hours just for ten minutes of phone time.
Food has been the ritual that binds us together recently. Since moving back, I’ve been cooking dinner much more, but I haven’t settled into a groove yet. Our ayi in Shanghai had a few rotating dishes that were crowd favorites.
I don’t remember much of the shows I used to watch, or what my mom’s curry tasted like.
I remember how they made me feel.
Maybe that’s what really stays.