Enough with the trifles, on to something more serious.
After my grandparents returned home from their 4-day stay in Chicago, my mother secretly revealed to me that prior to departing Florida, they worried we’d have nothing to talk about, that communication would be such a problem we’d end up just doing nothing all weekend. They were surprised to find that despite having lived by myself for three years, I still spoke Taiwanese fluently, enough so that we had no difficulty having long, involved conversations about life, about what their lives where like when they were my age, about what my parents were like when they were young, and how I should dedicate myself to the task of finding a suitable wife, with the goal of producing grandchildren as soon as possible, the usual grandparent-y stuff. My mom told them the secret to my inexplicable ability to retain my Taiwanese language skills: I call at least one member of family, more often than not two or more, every day. Not because I feel a particular need to share the private details of my life with them (our conversations are actually quite banal and usually detail free, usually just family gossip about my siblings), but rather that I worry constantly that without steady reinforcement, I’d slowly lose my ability to speak what is, at least in theory, my native language. Throughout middle and high school I refused to be anything but a fully assimilated American in front of my friends. Since then. I’ve given a great deal of thought over what it means to be Asian, to be an American, to be an Asian-American, and just as I’ve come to a point where I think I have found the desire to grasp on to my cultural identity, when I can finally stop taking it for granted, I can feel it evaporating from my life, one day at a time.
