my mother and father on their third or
fourth date; circa 1982



In graduate school, my father dated a woman who was plain but sweet. She could have made him happy. A poor boy from the countryside, he had a family to support: There was his alcoholic father who gambled away all his life savings investing in a pachinko parlor, his square-faced mother who struggled to make ends meet sewing dresses and selling rice by the kilo, his two younger brothers still in school, and his older sister who dreamt of owning finer things one day.

He couldn't decide if it'd be worth the effort to court this lady friend of his, so my father walked around with a red bean (a symbol of love in Taiwanese culture) and a 10NT coin in his trousers pocket for weeks on end.

The 10NT coin eventually grew into a hundred, and then a thousand, until my father was able to travel to the other side of the world to America. He lived in a foreign country for thirteen years, and made just enough to send some money home to his family still on that faraway island in the Pacific. On days when he felt the nostalgia bug course through his veins, he'd drive to the international airport and watch the planes take off one by one.

He'd then come home to a beautiful wife, who struggled to sustain her excitement over their shiny, new microwave in a kitchen that was smaller than her bedroom at home. After all, she had grown up with maids and drivers, and weekend outings to the movie theater to watch the Sound of Music when it finally arrived from overseas. In America, she found out that Ritz crackers were sold in bulk on aisles in supermarkets all over the city, and they soon lost their golden imported taste she remembered so well from her childhood.

Nothing ever sprouted from the red bean my father had housed in his pocket so many decades ago.