My Little Sister

Dear Ms. Yang                                                                                      It gives me great pleasure to inform you that the Committee on Admissions has voted to accept your application for admission to Georgetown University.  I am happy to offer you a place in the first-year class for the fall of 2011.                           You are to be congratulated on the distinction of being accepted under the Early Action program. Admission was especially competitive as offers were extended only to those candidates whose extraordinary academic and personal accomplishments ensured they would be admitted regardless of the strength of the remaining applicant pool.  This year, the Committee on Admissions considered over 6,600 applications, but limited the number of acceptances to approximately 17% of those who applied. Georgetown does not require Early Action candidates to confirm their enrollment immediately.  You must observe the Candidates' Reply Date of May 1, a common deadline for all applicants, but I do hope that we will hear from you as soon as your decision is certain.  When you have reached your decision, please return the enclosed enrollment agreement form together with the required non-refundable deposit to confirm your place.  Please read carefully the enclosed details for more information regarding your enrollment.  I also encourage you to visit the accepted student website for the most current updates about campus activities.                         I am pleased to speak on behalf of the entire Georgetown community in extending to you this offer of admission.  I look forward to welcoming you to the University as a member of the Class of 2015. Sincerely,  Charles A. Deacon Dean of Undergraduate Admissions (December 14, 2010)

Father to daughter

When my dad doesn't know what to say to me, he asks about the last time I washed my hair. These episodes tend to occur while we are in an elevator or a waiting area, and are often witnessed by uncomfortable  bystanders. While ignoring him convinces him that the inquiry must be repeated so that those in the shop next door can hear as well, answering my dad only leads to questions more cringeworthy and specific. What do you mean "recently"? Wednesday or Thursday? Did you use the dandruff shampoo last time? Did you scrub clockwise? Did you rinse twice? Maybe you should wash your hair again tonight. Ten years of communication have accomplished little: my dad has yet to learn that the other people waiting for their dentist appointments should not be subject to the details of my shampooing regimen, and I have yet to discover a way to deflect these questions without losing it. 

What infuriates me is not so much my dad's tactlessness or his inability to keep his volume down in public, but rather his persistence in asking the questions I don't want to answer. He seems to relish latching onto subjects I have labelled either taboo or pointless, subjects such as my personal hygiene, and pestering me to discuss them. I do not know what he is trying to find in my answers-knowing when I last rinsed my hair hardly offers a glimpse into matters of the heart. It is of great importance whether I ate toast or porridge for breakfast, but arguments I've had with friends, doubts I've had throughout the day, insecurities I've acquired usually go unmentioned. Of course, by the time it occurs to my dad to ask me about such things, I am probably already fuming about having to repeat the lunch menu for a third time. It is as though, in groping through the dark, we always miss each other.

Yet, for two people who must resort to arguing about how often hair should be washed, we also share a strange collection of habits and mutual understandings. Like my dad, I ask lots of questions during TV shows, spend most of my time satiating a relentless sweet tooth, and have a soft spot for rabbits in green pajamas. We both tend to leave sweaty socks behind the bathroom door, cough in a way that infuriates my mom, and care entirely too much about the way others see us. My dad is a stickler for rules regarding anything from traffic to recycling, and though I hold romantic notions about being a rebel, breaking the rules usually leaves me feeling nauseous.There is an understanding that if I let my dad buy a 珍珠奶茶 on the way home, he'll buy me one too, and that if I cook anything, even charred carrot bits, he must praise it. 
Though I sometimes forget it, I am my father's daughter, and this somehow makes the searching worthwhile.

Someone to talk to

A bug's life in the Yang house

Whether clad in striped pajamas or a Donald Duck costume, whether lounging on the couch or perched on the dining room table, my mom is constantly prepared for battle. For while some choose to tackle countries or social institutions, her battle is with any cockroach, mosquito, and ant foolhardy enough to set an abdomen in her path. Usually this means the pests that inhabit this cauliflower-colored, 20 sq. ft. space we call home, and when the slipper smacks and the flyswatter sounds, the rest of us scramble to stay out of the way .

Though sounds of falling furniture or slamming bathroom doors have come to signal scrimmages in this ongoing war, most of my mom's work is done stealthily, in the hours after bedtime. It is not until I have woken in the morning that I learn of the mosquito that persisted in buzzing in her ear until she smashed it with my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird at 3 AM, or the cockroach my mom ended up tearing in half (armed with tissues, she assured me) to ensure it would not revive (something, she also assured me, cockroaches are known to do). She recounts these campaigns with the pride of a seasoned general recalling battles hard won, and though her accounts involve discovering caterpillars in the vegetables and laying siege to ant colonies, they impress me more than any war story ever could. While I cannot understand battle tactics or army formations, I do understand the horror of stepping over a dried orange peel and realizing that it has legs and has begun scuttling across the floor, or the disappointment of uncovering the fruit tart you've been saving for days only to find that ants have nibbled their way through it.

But for somehow to devotes so much of her free time to wrangling with creepy crawlies underneath the refrigerator, my mom also seems to feel a strange affinity for these intruders. After once discovering an entire cockroach casting balanced on an orange in our pantry, she decided to mount the display, exoskeleton and all, on our kitchen shelf. She inspected it, admired it, gloated over it, and pointed it out to visitors as though it were an art exhibit. The cockroach casting remained there for days until we coaxed her to discard it with promises of a newfangled mosquito zapper.

TV Soulmate

my sister

It is important to watch TV with someone who understands you. Someone who doesn't mind that you spent the past twenty minutes trying to guess what will happen next and so now have no idea what's going on, who appreciates the esoteric humor of uneven nostrils, and who agrees almost as fervently that the two men should just ditch the girl they're fighting over and start a life together. Someone who won't try to strangle you after you've ruined the second kissing scene in film (she also noticed the string of saliva), and who looks forward to watching 我們這一家 as much as you do.

I did not come to appreciate the value of a television soulmate until I spent an afternoon watching television with my uncle's family. The episode we happened to be watching involved scene after scene in which the characters seemed to do little but gaze fervently into one another's eyes while dramatic music swelled in the background. I suddenly remembered that my biology teacher once reminded us to watch for saccades (rapid shifting of the retina to focus on certain parts of an image) when the camera zoomed in on the eyes, and snorted in amusement at the thought of the lovers' eyes twitching uncontrollably to orchestral accompaniment. Once the snort had escaped, I regretted it. Snorting out loud while watching TV on someone else's couch had to be bad manners. Had I been watching tv with Emily, she would have been amused to learn about involuntary eye twitching, but my cousin simply glanced at me, disturbed by my insensitivity to the lovers' plight.

Our TV-watching ritual at home involves yelling constantly at the screen, finishing each other's sentences, making irrelevant observations regarding asymmetrical eyebrows-and an unnecessary number of hi-fives. "She almost tripped! She almost tripped! Did you see that? Hi-five!" I don't know why I find romantic climaxes so hilarious, or "she almost tripped" worthy of a hi-five. I don't know why I feel a compulsion to make a prediction every few minutes (I am rarely correct, but I always speak with great conviction), or feel a need to substitute professions of love with lines about cucumber sandwiches and boogers. But at least Emily feels the same way. And while none of my friends can understand my obsession with 我們這一家, Emily knows why I laugh every time 花媽 starts lecturing her kids or wages a war against the mosquitoes in the living room. Because we share so many things in our lives, Emily has also come to share my sense of humor. She knows what I am thinking when orchestra starts and the male and female lead get that look in their eye. And she knows our mom looks exactly like 花媽 when she gets starts swatting those mosquitoes.

Watermelons

I consider my mom an expert when it comes to shopping for vegetables and fruits. She knows instinctively which tomatoes are sweetest, which mushrooms are fresh, and even which peas to pick. Over the course of countless trips to the marketplace, I have managed to collect some tips--tips that concern everything from the ripeness of wax apples and mangoes to the benefits of yellow kiwis . Papayas should be long rather than wide (those wider in girth tend to be hollow), and heads of cabbage should be springy rather than solid to ensure flavor and juiciness. Yet, such tidbits of knowledge are just that--tidbits, and this infinitely useful art form never ceases to bewilder me.

As it bewilders my dad. He is not so accomplished in the arts of grocery shopping--his area of expertise lies in physics, and in explaining things like gravity and rainbows in unnecessarily complex terms. But lately, he's begun to dabble in this other field of science, and he's been improving at a startling rate. My dad is now solely responsible for buying the guavas in our refrigerator. Not to mention the fact that he's also gained a considerable amount of confidence in his choice of watermelons.

Over the months, my two parents have formed dangerously different views on how to pick watermelons.

According to my dad, when picking a watermelon, one must vigorously tap the melon in question, and then listen intently for several seconds afterwards, measuring the frequency of the reverberations beneath the mottled green rind. To demonstrate his theory, my dad once tapped a "good" watermelon and a "bad" watermelon. Although my dim ears could detect little difference ("slap, slap" versus "slap, slap"), my dad assured me that the first sound was much "juicier" and "sweeter." (I let it go. He might have momentarily confused his sound and taste adjectives, but he really sounded like he knew what he was doing. I also didn't want him pressing his ear against the watermelons--with unusual tenderness I might add--any longer than absolutely necessary. What if we were seen?)

So when we went to RT Mart last week and stumbled upon the crate of watermelons in the aisle beside the pineapples, it went something like this:

"Look! Watermelons!" (That was me. I tend to state the obvious.)

"Here! I'll choose one!"

My dad made his way to the crate and proceeded to tap every watermelon in sight. The rest of the family winced. What if one of the watermelons exploded without warning? What if someone we knew was lurking in an aisle nearby?

"No, no, that's not how you do it. Here's a good one." No doubt thinking the same things I did, my mom quickly brushed him aside and, summoning her magical powers, pointed to another one. Of course, my dad then began to tap that one, and the echoes apparently told him something else.

"No. This one doesn't sound sweet enough."

"That one." This time, the watermelon my mom pointed to was beneath four or five other watermelons, but such an awkward position did nothing to deter my tireless father. Cramming his hand into the tangle of melons, he finally managed to tap the target. We waited in suspense.

"All right! This one it is then!"

Thus began a five minute struggle to move the other watermelons out of the way so we could place the chosen one into our cart. Emphatic gesturing and serious discussion of logistics was involved, and I am sure the people who happened to wander past aisle nine were shocked by the aggressiveness of our attack and the number of watermelons we balanced in our arms. But what may have seemed like chaotic juggling to others was somehow comforting to me. As we wrestled and heaved, chattered and grunted, I couldn't help but smile to the melon I happened to be cradling.

After ten years' worth of squabbles over toothbrush mix-ups and whose turn it is to wash the dishes, we're still moving watermelons together.