no christmas
So yeah. Merry frickin’ day-after-Christmas.
Like Peter, Christmas at the Hsiung family has become a low-key affair. When I was three, my cousins would come over, and we’d had three generations of family come over, open presents, and sing Christmas carols. Fucking Christmas carols, for goddsake. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t have the old photographs to prove myself otherwise.
Yeah, times change. To make a long story short: Cousins move away, aunts and uncles get a divorce, your sister gets sick, your grandmother decides she’d rather spend time with a son whose daughter-in-law doesn’t hate her. You know how it is.
So this Christmas, it was decided: no Christmas. The fake Christmas tree made out of plastic that we would construct as a family years before would not be pulled out of the garage. The Christmas turkey has been replaced with a Christmas hot pot, which is as simple as boiling chicken broth and dipping paper-thin slices of meat in it so it cooks faster.
We don’t talk during dinner. Nothing to talk about. Angela bursts into short spurts of laughter, obviously entertained by the voices in her head. “What are you laughing at,” my mother asks, frustrated. My sister looks down. “Nothing,” she says.
After dinner, we do what every other Chinese family does on Christmas day when nothing is open: we go to the Ranch 99. The supermarket, all the restaurants and the outlying Asian stores were open full hours, like it was Wednesday in August. A lot of Asian families, single waiguoren not wanting to be alone for the holidays and Latinos pissed off that they’re working on Christmas day. I swear to god, us Chinese people wouldn’t know about the Christmas spirit if it was rolled into metallic cannisters and shoved up our asses.
But then again, it’s not like I know about the Christmas spirit either.
Sorry if this sounds like it’s taken out of The Joy Luck Club. But yeah. It’s over with.
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