LYD Classic. Original publish date: 12/26/2006 (30)
Editor’s Note 2026: I wrote this on December 26, 2006, when I was 30 and still smoking on patios and watching gay bars from across the street and calling it a Christmas. I’m reposting it now because I found myself thinking about that scarf recently, which I know sounds like a strange place for a memory to live, but here we are. Mom doesn’t do fancy restaurants anymore. Angela doesn’t do Christmas. Some of what’s in here reads like a comedy, and I’ve decided to let it, because it was, a little, and also because the alternative is calling it a tragedy, and I don’t think it’s that either.
The scarf was made from silk. It had blue flowers on it.
“No.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Mom asked in Chinese. “Blue is a color, for boys.”
“Mom, no.” In English. “A thousand times no.”
“Wah, THOUSAND NO,” Mom mocked. She balled up the fabric and stuffed it in my inside jacket pocket anyway. “Not a gift.”
“Not a gift,” I repeated. We stopped exchanging gifts the year Mom knocked over the two Christmas trees in a fit of rage, another argument with Dad about Grandma. They were artificial trees anyway, and they would have stayed up until Chinese New Year otherwise.
My sister, mother, and I were going to Parcel 104, adjacent to the Santa Clara Marriott, one of those California-cuisine places where telecom executives have power lunches and hire and fire each other. Even though the food all ended up being one generic chicken breast with a side of steamed asparagus, it was one of the few American restaurants open on Christmas Day. It was a change from our standard holiday dinner at Darda Seafood, the Halal Chinese restaurant in Milpitas with the red lanterns and the wall-sized mural of Mecca.
“Why do you want American food, anyway?” I asked Mom in the car.
“If it were up to me,” Mom said, turning up Johnny Mathis on the radio, “I would say just to take us to Hometown Buffet. They have good ribs.” Ribs, drenched in the despair of people eating alone. Besides, I already checked there, and they closed at six.
“You’ll like where we’re going, Ma. They have a special name for what they do.” Farm to table, I said in English.
“Are we eating at a farm?” asked my sister.
“No, jie.”
But Mom was not impressed. “Hmmph! Isn’t the whole point of a restaurant that serves vegetables to come from a farm to a table? Do we not eat at tables anymore? Ridiculous.” She turned up the radio even louder, Johnny Mathis demanding a Merry Christmas for us by the time we entered the parking lot.
There is an argument — maybe not my argument, but someone’s argument nonetheless — that the Chinese have it right when it comes to the art of eating. A pair of chopsticks works well for grabbing food; a rice bowl is small enough to pick up with one hand, and use the chopsticks to shovel as much food as possible if necessary. It’s efficiency.
I was reminded of this as the nice man with the tuxedo sat us at the table with all the utensils: the regular fork, the fork for the salad, the dull knife for spreading butter on bread, and the sharper one to cut the bread in half.
Mom put on her reading glasses and studied the menu like a stereo installation manual, furrowing her brow. The light in here is too dim, she said, the words are too small. It didn’t help that the menu was in English as well.
There were options for game hens and veal with a parsley-lemon gremolata, and a “Hawaiian Ono” featuring a corn, tomato & almond romesco with melons. My mind blanked. I knew how to say the following words in Chinese: chicken. Lemon. Tomato. I think I learned the word for “corn” too, but it’s the cute way kids say corn, the Chinese equivalent of a grown-ass man putting on his Timberlands and saying he’s worn out his booties.
“Ma,” I asked her in Chinese, “Do you want beef or fish?”
“What kind of fish is it?” she asked. I looked at the menu: Dover sole.
“Fish,” I said. “White fish.”
I ordered a steak for my mother. It’s what my mom expects in American food: a slab of meat, and it provides good value. It helps that I know how to say “steak” in Chinese. As a starter, a sweet gem salad lettuce with summer beans and a toasted chicory soil, which everyone else in the world would just call a salad.
The greens arrived, and I watched my mother and sister literally bite off more than they could chew as the extra food fell onto their plates. At least Mom remembered to wipe off any buttermilk dressing off the corners of her mouth with a napkin — Angela just used the back of her hand. What was I going to do, correct her? Hell, she dumped out the Christmas hotpot the year before because Satan told her to.
I had an action plan, which was to nod and smile politely to anyone who would notice that table etiquette wasn’t really necessary on Christmas day, which, to be honest, was no one at all. No one cared — everyone had their own business to attend to. Hell, I’m sure our waiter had catered to worse people.
“You don’t have enough vegetables,” my mom said. She grabbed a forkful of sweet gem lettuce and bypassed my small plate, dumping it directly on my heirloom tomato bisque.
The last time Mom and I were in a fancy restaurant was when we went to Las Vegas, a Mother’s Day dinner at the top of the Stratosphere three or four years before. Our faces turned beet red after our one glass of house red wine, both of us allergic. Mom started pouring the rest of her Merlot into her empty Evian bottle to stash in her purse, and we got the evil eye from the maitre’d, but at that point, we were too red and dizzy to care. She just wanted to drink it later, she reasoned to herself, when she was at the nickel slots.
Again, efficiency.
I scanned the room to see if anyone was staring. If anyone gave us a hard time, I thought to myself, I could always accuse them of being racist; Bay Area folk hate being accused of racism.
But what could I do? It was Christmas night. So instead of objecting or making a fuss, I did the only thing I really could do: take my spoon, scoop up the salad swimming in my bisque, and shove the whole thing in my mouth as fast as possible. Chew, chew, swallow.
“You eat too fast,” my mother said. And then, almost instinctually, she took another grouping of lettuce leaves and belly-flopped it into my soup again. To which I ate faster.
“You’re funny, ma.” My sister cooed. “Fuhhh-nee!”
I imagined a movie camera on my bowl of soup, thick and creamy with gobs of lettuce resting on a surface, like a badly placed garnish. I imagined the camera zooming out, where they would see me at this moment, me with my suit jacket, silk scarf shoved in the pocket, playing Chubby Bunny with his mother’s salad on Christmas night. Then the camera would pan across the table through the rest of the restaurant, mother babying her son and sister bemused at everyone and the other tables, with their own Christmas business to attend to. Maybe they were quietly fighting. Perhaps they were making the most of a sub-optimal situation. Maybe both. A quick shot of the back of the restaurant, where our waiter smoked a cigarette in the alleyway, alone in the cold night air.
Every year in my twenties, the Christmas movie in my head repeated itself, parts of the plot changing ever so slightly. In this particular movie, my mother will say she had a lovely meal, even though the steak was too chewy, and that next year we’ll just go to Darda.
In all the other movies, I will pay the bill and drive my mother and sister home. We’re silent on the ride home, and the radio plays Grown-Up Christmas List by Natalie Cole, because it isn’t that weird how they always play that song every four hours? The sad ones at night, especially.
I will say goodbye to my sister half-heartedly and kiss my mother at the end of the night. No, Mom, I won’t move home, but yes, I promise to come home more often. I will watch Mom walk into the house while I sit in the car, and when the door is shut, I will light a cigarette. I will drive home and do whatever I usually do on Christmas night at this point in my life: change into sweatpants and a T-shirt. Remind myself of lunch with Dad the next day. Smoke an additional half a pack of cigarettes on our patio, watching men in Santa hats dance to Thunderpuss remixes of Whitney Houston at the gay bar across the street. Sit alone in my apartment living room, in the dark. Write a melodramatic, sad blog entry if it’s a bad year and Angela acts up, or Mom has had a particularly nasty fight with Dad. Self-medicate.
But all of that would come later. Until then, we had to wait for a couple of steaks, and I had my mother’s salad. I had lied to my mom, after all; my Christmas gift to her was a dinner and the gift of stuffing my face with baby gem lettuce as quickly as goddamn possible. It was the gift of efficiency.
And her Christmas gift to me was a scarf. With flowers! Blue flowers.
Your patience is amazing. If I were sitting in your place, after that dinner I would have sold my apartment and everything else I owned and moved somewhere deep in the woods where they'd never find me!