In January 2011 I had the honor of performing a personal essay I’d written in the Expressing Motherhood show in Los Angeles.  I’m happy to announce that I will be performing again in the upcoming September and October Expressing Motherhood show.  The Expressing Motherhood team has recently launched a blog featuring mothers and creativity, and this is the piece I wrote for them.  Enjoy!

http://expressingmotherhood.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/susan-sheu/

The following reminiscence is brought to you by my upcoming anniversary.  I’ve just finished writing a draft of a memoir, including some drama from 1997, and remembering that it was (for me, in the end) a very good year:

The artists’ residency is nearing the end.  With horses and panoramic views outside my writing studio window, I have almost forgotten the fabric of the daily grind in Los Angeles.  Soon enough the sound of traffic, which I will tell myself is soothing white noise, will greet me each day instead of the whinnying of horses and the buzz of cicadas and crickets.  I remember what day it is because I’ve remained a little too connected to the outside world, checking my email and texts frequently (but less so that I do at home, I hope).  With young children and a husband at home, it’s hard to pretend for very long that my life is anything other than elsewhere.  But my 15-year wedding anniversary is coming up later this week, and with a reminder from the news that yesterday (8/31) was the 15th anniversary of Princess Diana’ death, I am being pulled back into the stream of my life 15 years ago in Los Angeles

On the night that Princess Diana later died, my fiancé was on his way out to a bachelor party that his mostly single male friends had organized.  Because we were in our mid-20s and were Los Angeles transplants, the boys were keen on going full-cliché when it came to the bachelor party.  So they rented a limo, with all the accompanying libations, and proceeded on a tour of Hollywood’s finest (and probably some of the worst) “gentlemen’s clubs” and strip joints.  Cell phones were not common in those days, so I had to wait until the next day to hear all of the grubby details from my fiancé.  But apparently (and I believe him), the other “boys” were a lot more interested in the evenings’ proceedings that he was.

My friend Sarah had made the arrangements for my bachelorette party on the same night.  If this were a movie and you could track the two parties’ movements on a map, you might see that we began in the same part of town, Hollywood, but that the paths diverged after dinner.  The boys stayed in Hollywood, where most of what could be called “gentlemen’s clubs” are located.  The girls began in Hollywood, where we had too many margaritas at a Mexican restaurant in Los Feliz and tried to buy Brad Pitt a drink.  But the cocktail waitress shut us down, saying (rightly) that if she sent him a drink from a bunch of gigging girls, he would stop frequenting their establishment.  (This was so long ago that it was actually in the immediate post-Gwyneth, pre-Jennifer period!  He was technically available!)  We soon headed to West Hollywood, where the men who actually enjoy dancing are.

When the news broke that Princess Diana had died, we were in the midst of a thumping gay club in West Hollywood.  Anyone out in LA that night, indeed anywhere with a television, knew that she was in grave condition and not expected to live after her horrible car accident.  The music stopped, and the DJ announced her death.  All of us, the sweaty mass of gay men and the gussied-up girls who surround them, plus my mother – singular in the club in her conservative dress and her shock at the sexually explicit videos on the ubiquitous TVs, paused for a moment of silence.  Then, as if to honor the fallen princess, we all resumed dancing again.  If anything the dancing became more primal and intense to pay tribute to her glamorous memory, the beautiful girl bound by duty in a loveless marriage.

Later that week Mother Teresa would die, and many upstanding people would rightly complain that Diana’s death was overshadowing the loss of an authentically saintly woman.  The mature, right-thinking part of me agreed.  But it was the story of the luckless princess that stayed with me as, one week later, I wore my own tiara and married for love.

This is a photo I snapped on a recent trip to New York.  I was staying a few blocks away from the venerable Chelsea Hotel.  At the time it seemed too cliché to photograph the Dylan Thomas plaque, but now I wish I had.  Coincidentally, I was also reading Just Kids by Patti Smith, which takes place in part at the Chelsea Hotel circa 1970.

Patti Smith’s book is not the kind of memoir narrative I’m used to.  It’s elegiac and oblique, dense and literary, pure in tone with moments of the sublime.  And yet I can practically feel the grime of true artistic poverty of the 1960s and 1970s.  For example, no other modern nonfiction book about the United States comes to mind that includes lice, bedbugs, and trench mouth.  The book tells the story of Patti Smith’s long, loving friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe.  The two young artists came into the Chelsea scene while Salvador Dali and William Burroughs still roamed New York bohemia.  Jim Carroll, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Sam Shepard, and even Bruce Springsteen figure into the story.  There were other names that I didn’t recognize, and for once I wished for an e-book with hyperlinks to Wikipedia entries, just so I could try to put the nearly forgotten avant-garde pieces together.  That’s one of the great values of this book — as a literary history of the vanished artistic scene when Andy Warhol set the tone and the Velvet Underground were ascendant.

There was a time when I loved the Velvet Underground.  I liked the way they sounded.  But in the late 1980s digging the Velvet Underground was also an excellent way to distinguish yourself in artistic, liberal arts scenes as someone too cool to listen to bubble gum pop.  My first experience with their music was buying an LP at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis in 1986.  My cool friend Yvonne, acting as a human iTunes Genius before we’d ever dreamed of such a thing, was advising me to buy something by the Velvet Underground for my high school boyfriend (who loved Echo and the Bunnymen).  The boyfriend didn’t last that much longer, in the scheme of things, but pegging myself as a girl who knew from the Velvet Underground helped me win the respect (and sometimes the temporary love) of other boys as I moved into college.

All of the artsy kids at college knew a little about the Warhol scene.  Between the little bits we knew about Lou Reed or John Cale or having seen the Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans or the Marilyn Monroe prints gave just enough information to know who Billy Name was when he visited our college to give a talk.

Years later I had the opportunity to meet someone from Warhol’s Factory — and I had no idea who she was.  It was 2002 and I was living in Santa Monica.  The artsy girl who went to Vassar in the late 1980s had been nearly replaced by a suburban, pregnant 30-something earning a PhD at UCLA in public health.  My neatly bobbed head was full of risk ratios and research opportunities.  And one day, walking my dog around the corner from my home, I met an older woman who seemed to really groove on my pregnancy.  She was a total anomaly for the neighborhood — hippy-ish yet patrician, no plastic surgery and a yipping terrier (civilized and docile labradors were becoming the norm).  She introduced herself as Viva, then quickly corrected herself and said she was also Janet, which only reinforced my first impression that she was a crazy person and now I’d have to alter my usual dog walk to avoid her.

But I didn’t.  She was different from the mellow, athletic folk I was used to meeting in my neighborhood, much more ragged around the edges but compelling in a way that the doe-eyed decaf drinkers were not.  As I ran into her on other dog walks, she offered advice (and physical demonstrations) about how women in other cultures birth babies (in tents, relieving labor pain by hanging from their arms off a tree).  She also began to tell me about all of the people she knew in New York, and that she was known as Viva Superstar.  Andy Warhol had named her that and put her in his movies.  And she had lived for many years at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.

At first I didn’t believe her.  I grew up with a mentally ill man for a father, and I am used to humoring people who seem off their rocker.  But one day I Googled her and found that Viva Superstar really did exist, and that she was indeed my neighbor Janet.

Viva Superstar YouTube

There’s more to the story that I hope to tell in the future – a story of gentrification and turning an already vanilla neighborhood into more of one.  The last time I saw Viva/Janet, she was at the Beverly Hills courthouse trying to avoid getting evicted by her nasty troll of a landlord.  I and several other people from the neighborhood were witnesses on her behalf.  This week, reading the Patti Smith book, I was just happy to see her name again and catch the faint incense whiff of her glory days as a Factory girl and avant-garde icon.

Last month I learned how to ski in Canada, at the same place where 12 years earlier I learned to snowboard.  In those days, at 30, I suspected I was too old to learn how to do something like ski or snowboard.  Still, I put on my helmet and hoped no one would guess my age.  I hated how hard it was.  Early on, I likened my hard falls to “cement enemas,” but I was committed to learning.  Snowboarding was a welcome change from my graduate school work: it allowed me to be worked over by a snow-covered mountain rather than an academic committee.

A year later my father died, and snowboarding became a “Fight Club” of one that was more solace to me than all of the kind sentiments offered by my friends and acquaintances.

This is a version of something I wrote for a writing class in 2004.  Enjoy.

Fall is here, and my thoughts turn to strengthening my abs.  While many think of spring as a time to seek the elusive six-pack for swimsuit season, a chill in the air reminds me that I’m about to reacquaint myself with my boots and snowboard, the nonexistent six-pack nowhere to be seen under layers of fleece and waterproof Gore-Tex.

I don’t come from an athletic family.  It’s more than a little sadomasochistic that, with my non-jock history, I’m embarking on snowboarding at this late date.  The “sado” part is that I’ve coerced my husband along for the painful, expensive ride.  His family, more cerebral and even more sedentary than mine, has an unofficial motto: “Why stand when you can sit?  Why sit when you can lie down?”  He has taken up the more dignified sport of skiing, and he’s none too happy with pain and the black toenails that tell him that he’s rented the wrong boots.

Our parents disapprove when we tell them the weekends we’ll be away skiing.  Just as when we adopted our first dog several years ago, they act as though we might not be licensed operators of our own lives.  They rattle off stories of broken limbs, fruitless search teams, decomposed bodies, and amputated feet.  After we tell them we’ve already booked our flights, my mother or his father will say, “Oh well, then.  Have a good time.”

Flying from LAX to Reno/Tahoe should be easy enough.  But ever since I’ve had a baby, the schlep with the snowboard, suitcase, stroller, and toddler supplies, has become an almost prohibitive hassle.  Lugging it all reminds me of the discomforts to come: my back leg cramping with the hop-slide movements forward in the lift line; the packed and overpriced cafeteria selling prefab cocoa and greasy chili; and the labor of hobbling off the slopes, parking the board, and removing layers, just to go to  the bathroom.

Last winter my trials began right off the bat, when I drove in a blizzard through Donner Pass at night in a rented minivan with my laughing baby, our babysitter, and her preteen child.  They gritted their teeth as we skidded along the highway despite my slow speed and the chains on the tires.  I put on a show of bravado to reassure them and myself that we would not die in this stupid manner.  Many hours later, past midnight, we arrived at the rented cabin.  The babysitter and I spent the next two hours digging out the driveway and hauling our bags and the sleeping children into the house.

The hoards of Californians rushing the gondola at 8 am are another challenge.  And then, after traveling up the lift with total strangers, I actually have to ride the mountain.  Writing all of this down, it’s hard to believe that I do this voluntarily, when a part of me has more in common with the spouses and friends who spend the day at the lodge, drinking beer and shooting the breeze with anyone who happens to sit on the next bar stool.

What I actually enjoy about snowboarding takes a few runs to experience: the flow and enforced in-the-moment feeling.  If I allow myself to begin thinking about messy and complicated things, say, my doctoral dissertation, I fall.  I have to use my reptilian brain: eyes on the snow and on the boarders and skiers around me; and my mind on the immediate challenge of whether to go over or around the small mogul a few feet in front of me, whether to take the green run or try that blue one that peels off at the bottom of this hill.

During my second year, just after my father died, snowboarding became my own “Fight Club” of one.  My dad and I had not been close; his severe mental illness had been the unwelcome third parent in my upbringing.  After a week at his funeral in Taiwan, mourning him and the happy relationship we would never have, I returned to school in and the relentless, incongruous sun of January in Los Angeles.

Soon after I went snowboarding, hoping that, for one weekend, external pain and icy solace could displace sorrow.  At the top of each black diamond run I dared, I saw the expanse of frosted, ancient fir trees and the deep, pure lake below, surrounded by mountains.

There’s no place on earth like this, I thought.

I glided down, falling-leaf style, the mark of a beginner.  In my mind, there was no past and no future, only riding down the mountain.

Last week I was lucky enough to tell a story at The Moth ”Marriage” show in Santa Monica.  I’m not someone who moved to Los Angeles to be an actor, although I love my actor and comedian friends and go to as many of their shows as I can.  I don’t really want to be on stage at all, but I don’t want to be afraid of it either — which is why I recently took a great stage class called The Comedian’s Way, taught by the talented team that produces Los Angeles’ Un-Cabaret.  When friends asked if I was an aspiring stand-up comic or actress/actor (depending on how PC they were; maybe we should just agree to call them actrons), I kept having to say no.

What I finally figured out was that it was like being a runner and deciding to take a yoga or strength class to improve my game.  Provided I finish, I will have to read aloud from the book at bookstores and other events.  I just wanted to try something new, ostensibly to help prevent me from “choking” onstage.  In the writers/spoken word stage shows that I’ve participated in so far, Expressing Motherhood and Spark Off Rose, I had step outside my comfort zone to craft a compelling version of true events that happened in my life.  I also had to work at mastering my nerves and LEARN TO PROJECT!  Or at least not mumble and speed up.  People in the audience have reacted with kindness and interest to the parts of the story that I told onstage, and like a treat thrown at a dog to reward training, the praise encouraged me to continue the work.

As a writer working on a book, I am throwing the long pass.  I’m not really shy, but the way that I “choke” onstage is to wax boring — to suck the drama out of the story and flatten it out into the most linear, “normal-sounding” story I can.  It’s one by-product of many years of working on being the opposite of my parents, both hysteric types in their own way (one schizophrenic, the other just a crier).  And, as I discussed with my ex-actor husband, once one has succeeded in drumming the dramatic impulse out, it’s very hard to summon again when you need it.

I love listening to shows like The Moth, This American Life, KCRW’s Unfictional, and any of the new independent producer projects that air on public radio these days.  I also love going to Los Angeles nonfiction/spoken work shows like Tasty Words, Don’t Tell My Mother, and the many others that have sprung up all over Los Angeles in recent years.  While there are plenty of actors and writers telling interesting stories, there are other types of people too.  I am convinced that the impulse to tell a story in front of a room full of strangers is a force for good.  At worst it’s a modern-day prayer meeting of narcissistic truth addicts and seekers.  At best it’s something like learning cursive or how to build a fire from scratch or mastering foreplay, a long-form art that slows us down and humanizes us as we connect with another human being and occasionally feel less alone as a result.

I chose a story to tell for The Moth about the longest two weeks of my life, in the spring 15 years ago, a few months before I was married, when my father dropped in on my boyfriend and me and brought many trash bags full of his belongings into my apartment.  When I was selected out of the pile of names at the show, I was prepared but still very shaky about telling it to a room of what looked to be 200 strangers.

The story began as a tale of a mentally ill anti-Semitic Chinese man, who happened to be my father, coming to live with my Jewish boyfriend and me.  It ended up focusing on the caution of people my age when settling down to marry, waiting to find out all about the would-be spouse, only to find that there’s more “baggage” to discover.

Once I finished, I was relieved that my scores were respectable and that I’d done it.  (In the week leading up to it, my husband kept referring to it as “The Goblet of Fire” – a nerdy but apt Harry Potter reference.  Another friend and mentor referred to it as “popping the cherry,” another apt comparison.)

What I’ve come to realize is that the athletic cross-training raison d’être for learning to tell a story onstage is pretty right-on.  In honing my story for the possibility of being selected at the Moth, I learned to edit in a new way.  I pared down the plot that needed to be told within the time limits, while still trying to throw in enough detail to establish character and introduce stakes.  I didn’t tell a “perfect” story by any means.  But I did it, and I’m a lot less intimidated than I was before I subjected myself to it.

I read an article on “mindful eating” the other day in the New York Times.  It’s about applying the principles of mindfulness and meditation, being in the moment while eating.

I couldn’t figure out whether to laugh or cry, since I practice the exact opposite of mindful eating.  This practice of mine is not for any weird LA anorexic/dietetic reason; it hardly feels like a choice at all.  My children’s school is five miles away, through one of the densest parts of Los Angeles.  Between the school commute and after school activities, household errands, and traveling back and forth across one small swath of my area code for personal and work errands (the gym, a writing class), I drive hours each day.  I actually drove less when I worked 35 miles away from home, since my kids pretty much stayed in one place (home or preschool) during those years.

This was not how my life in Los Angeles began.  I moved here in 1994, several months after the Northridge earthquake.  Traffic was not the epic force of nature that I’d been led to expect, perhaps because there had been a significant exodus after the earthquake.  But the biggest reason my husband and I didn’t have any sense of traffic was because we lived about a mile from our jobs and graduate programs at UCLA.

Many days we’d drive anyway, laughing ruefully about how much we were becoming like the Steve Martin character in “LA Story,” who drives next door to his friend’s house.  Sometimes my husband would be home early, shop at Trader Joe’s, and whip up an overly complicated meal by the time I arrived home from work.  When acquaintances would tell us how horrible their commutes were, how hard it was to juggle work, school pickup, karate practice, and some sad semblance of a family life, we would try to muster some sympathy.  But we had no idea.  In one corner of our minds, we were often thinking that the poor whining jerk should just move somewhere more practical, or stop trying to have it all.

Oh, how the young and cocky have fallen.

My husband now drives 50 to 60 miles away to his two job sites (in different counties), and I zigzag around a tiny corner of Los Angeles doing the daily Rubic’s cube of our family life and my writing, such as it is.  There’s a ball of hair on the floor of my car, and I realize that I now have a nervous tic of pulling out my own hair as I sit in interminable traffic.  Yes, it’s come to that: I now exhibit caged animal behavior in my own car, as if this life isn’t a product of our own choices.  (I hope that by outing myself this way, I will redirect my nervous energy back into swearing-as-an-art-form instead of plucking myself.)

I know that if we went “full Unibomber” (i.e., lived “off the grid” — which is to say anywhere other than Los Angeles, New York, or a handful of other cities), as we sometimes threaten to do, that life would be simpler.  When I visit family members in quieter parts of America, I am in awe that in one afternoon, a person can do several errands, make dinner, and still read part of a book.

But after all these years in Los Angeles, and the friends we have here, and how accustomed we are to the relative diversity and the precarious beauty of it all, it would be very hard to leave.  I have come to view Los Angeles as a huge, beautiful but garish tattoo that I got when I was young.  I sometimes regret it, but I have it, and that’s that.

And as I rounded the corner too fast, one piece of four-day-old pizza hanging out of my mouth, the other piece between my legs on crumpled aluminum foil, the Don Henley song “Sunset Grill” came on the air, and I listened to the words as I inhaled the food:

Let’s go down to the Sunset Grill

Watch the working girls go by

Watch the basket people walk around and mumble

Gaze out at the auburn sky

Maybe we’ll leave come springtime

Meanwhile, have another beer

What would we do without all these jerks anyway?

And besides, all our friends are here.

Much has been written about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the book by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua.  If you are not a parent, or are not Asian, perhaps you have not heard of it, except possibly from your friends with kids.  They probably either hate the book and wish ill to its author or who grudgingly acknowledge that American kids could use some of her tough parenting style.

I don’t wish ill to Amy Chua.  I wish her anti anxiety drugs.  And I wish that she had waited to publish this book until her children were adults.

There are no Tiger Mom stories from my childhood.  My father was Chinese, and my mother was Caucasian.  In fact, my mother was (and is) exactly what Amy Chua would picture when she describes the soft-hearted, conflict-avoiding Western parent who avoids setting standards too high and praises “mediocrity” when it comes to her children.

My mother did all sorts of ineffectual things that Amy Chua would cite as evidence of the decline in achievements in second-generation Asian children.  She told my brother and me that “we could be anything” and that we were beautiful and brilliant.  She was riding the tide of pre-ERA Amendment feminism.  In every loving, starry-eyed pep talk were vapors of Helen Reddy lyrics mixed with Mr. Rogers-style parenting.

In fact, we were decent-looking, surly, and of modest talents compared to many of our peers.  It sometimes felt nurturing to have a mother who was affectionate and believed in us.  Both of us have earned graduate degrees and work in skilled jobs.  But I sometimes suspect that part of the reason we have become professionals is that we finally believed the hype about Asian kids being inherently smarter, and we regressed to the mean of our model minority-hood by graduating from respected colleges.  (I’m mostly kidding.)

My father, an immigrant from China via Taiwan, was in the tiger parent mold.  He was a civil engineer and attended one of the top universities in Taiwan.  But since my parents were divorced and he lived in another state, he could only drill us in math, science, and swimming one Sunday a month.  Although he was paranoid schizophrenic, I am convinced that most of his academic fervor and frustration with his children had more to do with our utter foreignness (the shrugs, the adolescent hostility, the lack of single-minded focus on achievement) – than with his mental illness.

Since The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published, some of my friends have asked me whether I’m a “tiger mother.”  My answer has sometimes been yes, but more often no.

When I’ve said yes, it’s been a day when I feel keenly aware that, like so many parents my own age I feel like I’ve got to be parenting “correctly,” which, now that they’re not babies anymore, slides easily into “preparing them for the future.”  My kids are learning Mandarin, piano, Hebrew, and each play a sport.

On a day when I deny being a “tiger mother,” I comfort myself with the fact that Mandarin is taught by a young woman far kinder and more patient than I am.  My daughter has school homework, and our family has decided that sleep and homework come before any extras.  My kids’ other activities are close to home.  Their sports – one day a week of barely competitive soccer for my son, three days of swim practice for my daughter – are because I just can’t bear to take them to the park anymore for their exercise.

It’s the curse/blessing of my public health education that I’m obsessed with preventative medicine through healthy eating and exercise.  And I’d like to think that I’m giving them something that they need, or at least that they will appreciate later.  My social son loves mixing it up with the other kids while he runs drills and plays short soccer games.  My cerebral daughter loves the mastery of swimming on a competitive team and needs a structured physical activity to get her out of her own head.

But there’s no way I can be a tiger mom.  For one thing, I was born in the year of the chicken.  And I’m only “hapa,” with the added disadvantage of a relaxed, White mother.  I lack the hunger to succeed and the anxiety about failure that plague the striving model minority parent.  Sometimes I call myself the Stoner Tiger Mother.  Most of all I strive to strike a balance between full-frontal parenting (Tiger Mom style) and allowing my kids to turn out to be the individuals they were born to be (hippy-dippy style).  Does that sound wishy-washy?   It is.  But it feels more honest and true to my agnostic nature than firebrand fanaticism than any parenting advice (or “self-effacing memoir”) I’ve read.

My husband and I lived in the same townhouse for over a decade.  The place suited us beautifully for about seven of those years and was too small for the last three, but we loved it.  Last fall we moved into a new home, and though we are perpetually nesting (think Hobbits, but less hairy), we have settled in.

There should be a word gentler than schadenfreude for the emotion that overcomes me when I receive automated email real estate searches.  (I once tried to disable the search, but now I sort of enjoy the emails.  Similar, I imagine, to a woman who has just married a wonderful guy but still enjoys seeing the sad listings the dating service sends her.)  Each time I receive an email with an automated real estate search I have a mini-flashback to our recent three years of house hunting.  This is a re-post of what I wrote almost a year ago, when I was still flushed from the absurdity of it all.

I’ve been going through what I’ll call the B.M. It stands for “big move,” but it might as well stand for bowel movement. (If one more acquaintance laughingly tells me that “life is what happens when you are making other plans,” I might cry, or turn psychotic.) About a year ago, my family found a new home after a several-yearlong search. We had lived in our home at the time for a decade. It was the place where my husband and I lived when my father died, when our two children were born. My brother lived with us for a time, in the distant past, when a three-bedroom home was too enormous for my husband and me. It was the home where we were when we both made big career changes and major decisions. We’d once thought of Los Angeles, in general, as the city where we developed into actual, responsible adults. But it was our first house, in particular, where the change had truly occurred.

In early 2010, our family had outgrown our house by several iterations. We had every imaginable built-in added – bookshelves, closet organization, a window seat. We had lovingly remade a part of each room, one project per year for several years, as our finances allowed. Every room was a multipurpose room. And we had become a multigenerational household with a full-time grandparent, two young children, two dogs, and where both parents needed an office. We didn’t want to sweat the move to a bigger home. We like to believe that we’re mellow people, and the original plan was just to chill out until the right house met us on the right Sunday at the right West Los Angeles open house.

But by the spring of 2010, my husband and I had gone around the hamster wheel of real estate insanity several times over. We had just been screwed out of a house that we really wanted — a house that was still too small, too expensive, and with a minuscule “view” guaranteed to be obliterated when the dilapidated cracker box across the street was razed. And, like our well-meaning friends assured us, not buying the house was for the best in the long run. Even as we practically dry-humped the seller’s agent in our joy at believing we’d been blessed with a house, a part of me could see this house in a make-believe science fiction movie about humans as hive-dwelling clones. Still, it stung to be shot down by a dishonest realtor (complete with slick gray combover and Mercedes coup), even if his sliminess ultimately saved us from a life of Stepford-dom.

We finally settled on a house in the spring of last year. Negotiations and financial wrangling ensued throughout the summer (think colonoscopy-grade invasiveness, by people not skilled in the art of colon exploration). Finally, in the middle of autumn, we moved in.

Here is a (non-comprehensive) list of things I won’t miss about our real estate search:

1. Euphemistic real estate-speak (e.g., “has potential” = is currently a sh*thole, but with a lotta love and the GDP of a small country, it could be okay; “has city views” = is hanging off a cliff, right at the smog level)

2. The weird competitive nature of fellow buyers – sizing one another up, creepy sidelong glances and instant antipathy, particularly if you like the house.

3. Hating everything about a house except for its funky green, vintage toilet.

4. Being shown homes with lavender bidets and being expected to keep a straight face.

5. Huge hot tubs built into itty bitty decks, thereby insuring that you either must have a hot tub or spend thousands removing it.

6. Physical accosting by agents at open houses, eager to be YOUR agent.

7. Magical thinking on pricing.

8. Receiving counter offers that are <0.05% less than original price.

9. F&cking moronic advice from your ex-agents to list your current house for sale before you find a new place. Because being homeless is “fun” for the whole family.

10. Jame Gumb-like basements – “it rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it’s told…”

11. “Front yards” that are dense seas of ivy masking dog feces and litter.

12. Being told that having a cliff as the border to your backyard is no problem, you just train your toddler not to fall off it. Besides, having a boy, you “should get used to spending a lot of time in the emergency room.” (see ex-agents from #9)

13. Pools that look like oversized urinals.

14. Gorgeous, tiled San Simeon-style pools that take up 80% of the yard on homes that, in terms of both size and quality, resemble my grandfather’s outhouse.

15. Giant, caged trampolines that fill the whole, depressing yard.

16. Houses that are surrounded on all sides by steep hills, inducing instant claustrophobia. To quote the Jimi Hendrix song, “feel like I’m living at the bottom of a grave.”

17. Houses that are so high up the canyon, I feel like I need a diving bell in my car.

18. Stacks of adult magazines and/or framed posters of bare, Brazilian-waxed women in the bedroom.

19. Bad karma houses: post suicide, illness, divorce, and death. You know this because the agent is whispering it in your ear, or the bedpans (that no one bothered to remove) give it away.

20. Houses that are staged with glasses of wine, highly mannered furniture, and Miami Vice-style art. Subtext: your life would be a 24-hour, glamorous, coke-filled party if you lived HERE!

21. Disliking a house, yet putting in an offer because you think you have a chance of getting this one. Like an absurd form of dating.

22. Being filled with dread and ennui on Sundays and Tuesdays.

23. Properties so remote and covered with flammable brush that you can practically hear the rattlesnakes, where you are strongly urged not to let your pets outside because of the coyotes and owls. And yet within the city limits, with big city prices and taxes.

24. Being asked to review and sign hundreds of pages of single-spaced, complex legal documents in under an hour.

25. Houses that smell like one great big cat litter box, mixed with mold.

This weekend we’re taking my mom out for dumplings at a wonderful Taiwanese restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley. It’s quite a schlep out there from West Los Angeles, so we don’t go as often as we would like to. But it’s my mom’s birthday, and she loves Chinese food, so that’s our destination.

My mom is not Chinese. She’s Caucasian — a blue-eyed German-Swede from Wisconsin. But ever since before she married my father, who was Chinese, she has loved Chinese food. In fact, one of the few other times my family and I have gone out for dim sum with her, we had a reminder of how strange and serendipitous life can be.

Just before Chinese New Year in 2005 my mom was visiting us in Los Angeles. I know because we took pictures of the big rooster decorations outside. She’d picked the restaurant from a list in the LA Times food section. We weren’t experienced dim sum people, so we drove out to the San Gabriel Valley and arrived during a rush. What looked like hundreds of customers, nearly all Chinese except for my husband and my mom, waited inside and outside the restaurant. We were about to give up, when we heard that there were only five parties ahead of us. The crowd was agitated. The 7-11 across the street was looking enticing. We waited another 45 minutes and prepared to leave.

Just before we gave up, we heard our number called. As we elbowed through the crowd of hungry, angry Asians in the front, a voice called out to my mom. No one else was speaking English. We heard my mom’s name again. She turned to the woman calling her, a middle-aged Chinese woman who smiled and repeated her name. My mom was drawing a blank.

“It’s me — Elena!”

My mom recognized her, and they hugged. It was her college roommate, visiting Los Angeles from Hong Kong via Texas. They spent a few minutes catching up while we snagged our long-awaited dim sum table. After that they began to correspond and visit one another. It had been decades since they had seen each other.

What added significance to the coincidental meeting was that Elena had been the friend who first introduced my mother to my father at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s. Of all the dim sum restaurants in all the world, my mom and Elena were both at the same one at the same time on a random Sunday in February. They half-joked about how Elena felt that she should apologize, since the marriage had turned out to be terrible. But, since I was listening, they made sure to point out that, in spite of all the misery between my parents, the marriage had resulted in beautiful children and a grandchild (my daughter).

I sort of hate relaying that story because it sounds like I’m trying to find meaning in everything, that all roads lead back to writing about my father (and mother). But for a long time there seemed to be no end of talismans pointing in that direction. It reminded me of the Shema prayer in Judaism (from Deuteronomy), where a person is commanded to wear the sacred words that have been handed down as “frontlets between your eyes.” I’m not religious per se, but there was something compelling about the edict to remember, particularly the story of where you came from.

This Sunday I’m not expecting any dramatic reunions, just delicious dim sum. There’s something about Taiwanese dumplings, the fresh, light interpretation of otherwise semi-greasy weekend food, that helps me remember what is otherwise too easy to forget in my workaday world of caesar salads and faux-meat burgers.

Since I’ve been on the road a lot this summer, I haven’t had enough time to write. So, in the mean time, here’s a personal story I read at the “Expressing Motherhood” spoken word shows at the Lillian Theatre in Hollywood in January 2011. I told a story about my lame attempt at instilling some “Chinese-ness” in my part-Asian children. Being a part of the show was a wonderful experience for me, and I met amazing women (including the producers/directors, Lindsay Kavet and Jessica Cribbs) with great stories to tell about becoming parents. Enjoy.

EXPRESSING MOTHERHOOD

My daughter and son are learning Mandarin. They are 8 and 5 years old, and this is their second year with a teacher. Each Tuesday afternoon and Saturday morning, a young woman from Taiwan comes to our home and teaches my children how to play store, politely ask someone’s surname, and other beginner essentials for young learners. She uses candy as a reward and motivator, and I pretend not to notice. Candy, I’ve observed, raises my children’s IQ’s by about 50 points, at least for a few minutes.

“Lao-shi, bang-bang ma?” my son asks.

He wants his teacher to help him open up the sticky wrapper so that he can enjoy the fruits of his attention to the lesson. I understand very little of their lesson. Even my son, who can’t seem to sit still for more than a minute, knows more Mandarin than I do.

Am I a pushy parent? I would be lying if I denied it. I’m half Chinese and Jewish by marriage and choice, so academic ambition is second nature to me. My father was born in China, but spent most of his adult life in Chicago. My mother was born in Wisconsin and has spent her entire life there. I was also born in Wisconsin and, except for two years in Taiwan, have lived in the US all my life.

Like many immigrants, my father turned away from his culture and language. When I studied Mandarin, briefly, in college, my father was not only not impressed, he discouraged me from taking his language too seriously. All of my reasons – that it was the language of one billion of the world’s people, the language of Confucius – he brushed away like a bad smell.

“Su-sahn!” he said. “Chinese is not important! English is important! Everyone speak English!”

I assured him that — having grown up in Wisconsin — my English was quite good. Whether my father approved or not, it hardly mattered; I bombed my Chinese class, in the end receiving a C-/D, and that was probably a gift.

When I lived in Taiwan for those two years as a toddler, I spoke Mandarin and my family’s Fujian dialect well enough to pass for a native, had I not been so White. There is a picture of my Chinese family in 1972, when I was three years old, that I think of as my whole life as a Mandarin speaker. In the back row stands my short, Swedish-American mother with her even shorter Chinese sisters-in-law, smiling slightly. The handsome trio of my father and his brothers, puffing up their chests in expensive suits and Cheshire cat smiles, occupies the other corner. The children – my cousins and I – sit at the feet of our elders. Our little grandmother, the matriarch, takes center stage, the place of honor. Her white hair is swept up in a bun, her long black chi-pao dress grazing the ankles just enough to see her doll-like bound feet in tiny slippers.

Not long after that, I returned to the States with my parents. I was about to begin kindergarten, my mother was pregnant, and my parents were divorcing. When I went to live with my mother and my new baby brother in Wisconsin, Mandarin and all feelings of being Chinese were sinking to the bottom of my consciousness. Over the next 20 years, I would live in Wisconsin. I saw my father once a month, but during those visits his agenda was feeding me a good meal, not teaching me anything about his culture or language.

My mother tried to keep alive in my brother and me some sense of our Chinese heritage, occasionally making a “blandinavian” version of a Chinese dinner or renting what few Chinese movies were available in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. But she was swimming against the tide. All around me were blondes, redheads, blue eyes and ski slope noses like my mother’s. As a teenager, I sometimes forgot what I looked like until catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror at school, always next to a girl who looked like Miss Denmark compared to my wide-nosed, sallow face and the Asian hair that I’d tortured into a curly bob. On the days when no such visual shocked me into remembering that I was Chinese, some well-meaning adult might address me on behalf of all Chinese people. “Don’t you all like math?” or “Your people value family so much!” I even got the occasional, “Oh my, you speak English very well!” And yet, I spoke no Chinese and knew almost no other Asians.

The experience in college, where I’d tried (and failed) to at least speak like the Chinese person I appeared to be, reminded me that I had no idea where I belonged.

By the time I reached my mid-twenties, I’d resigned myself to some in-between racial state. While I resented people assuming that I was a member of a tribe I knew nothing of, I still felt like that little girl in the family photo, half-White, half-Chinese, a face full of mourning for the things I had not yet lost. My Jewish fiancé and I moved to Los Angeles, where I immediately felt at home among all sorts of other mixed breed people. And it came as a shock to me when new people met me and assumed that I was just some variety of White person. That’s when I realized that, like it or not, whether or not I spoke Chinese, that’s who I was.

My children don’t look a bit Asian. They have beautiful, indeterminate faces that place them solidly in the “White” or “Other” census categories. I shouldn’t care if they can speak Mandarin or not, but I do. And no, it’s not just because I want them to be interesting college candidates. I think I just want them to have something I never had – a choice. I want them to feel at home among their people, whoever those people might turn out to be.