2023 Creativity Award
John Watson - click on image to view the recording
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Walking on Shattered Glass
by John Watson
Rice. Soup. Noodles. Fish, chicken, lap cheong, bok choy, salted eel. Cornstarch to thicken a broth, garlic and ginger for flavor, all of it served on a styrofoam plate. Don’t forget to use chopsticks, make slurping sounds while you eat, and most importantly, let 婆婆 scoop you seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths until your stomach feels like bursting open. We eat in her dimly-lit kitchen with an oven filled with pots. She has shelves filled with plants, used plastic bags, vitamins and more clutter. She has an old VCR television, always playing an old Chinese drama, and a small wooden table. Around it are chairs with quirky back supports and on top there are newspapers, metal jars, and paper towels for napkins. There is so much dullness in this kitchen, yet so much life and history and mystery.
I’ve always wanted to ask 婆婆 about everything she faced before she came to America. What was her life that she left behind in China? But I’ve never asked, because she speaks too little English, I don’t speak her dialect, and she doesn’t like talking about her past. My mother has shared the limited knowledge about it that she has but is not enough to suffice. There is still much I don’t know about my grandmother and our family’s history. There is so much pain, so much suffering, and surely so much joy, too, that I will never know about.
I do know that for various reasons, one of them being the fact that she grew up in a family torn apart by political upheaval, 婆婆 never received the kind of love that a child deserves from their parents, and that in turn she didn’t have enough left to give to my mother. That’s why, a few years ago while I was alone eating dinner with her, I was so shocked to hear her say, “John, I love you.” The weight of her love crushed me on the inside. It was a thousand times greater than anyone else’s because she would’ve never been able to say it to her own kids or her own mother. So helplessly, I told her I loved her too.
Now I stand in her kitchen again, but this time the entire family is here. In the other room, my younger cousins are watching Paw Patrol and playing on their Nintendo Switches, while my older cousins watch a basketball game and my siblings sit there on their phones. My younger cousins won’t eat the Chinese food that my aunt ordered. Instead they talk about how there’s no In-and-Out franchise in Boston. Here in the kitchen I can see my mom trying her best to make conversation with one of her brothers while one of my aunts apologizes to me for something that happened weeks ago. 婆婆 sits in the corner, picking at her squab.
It seems like none of us know how to talk to each other or how to love each other in the ways we long for. It’s easy to blame the older generations for their flaws as parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents, or to blame my cousins for turning their heads away from the culture, but I’ve learned that that’s just part of the legacy of Chinese immigration. Brokenness. We are all just as scared as the teenager 婆婆 was when she boarded a plane to the US. And still… I will never stop loving my family, even if it hurts just the same as walking on shattered glass.
I’ve always wanted to ask 婆婆 about everything she faced before she came to America. What was her life that she left behind in China? But I’ve never asked, because she speaks too little English, I don’t speak her dialect, and she doesn’t like talking about her past. My mother has shared the limited knowledge about it that she has but is not enough to suffice. There is still much I don’t know about my grandmother and our family’s history. There is so much pain, so much suffering, and surely so much joy, too, that I will never know about.
I do know that for various reasons, one of them being the fact that she grew up in a family torn apart by political upheaval, 婆婆 never received the kind of love that a child deserves from their parents, and that in turn she didn’t have enough left to give to my mother. That’s why, a few years ago while I was alone eating dinner with her, I was so shocked to hear her say, “John, I love you.” The weight of her love crushed me on the inside. It was a thousand times greater than anyone else’s because she would’ve never been able to say it to her own kids or her own mother. So helplessly, I told her I loved her too.
Now I stand in her kitchen again, but this time the entire family is here. In the other room, my younger cousins are watching Paw Patrol and playing on their Nintendo Switches, while my older cousins watch a basketball game and my siblings sit there on their phones. My younger cousins won’t eat the Chinese food that my aunt ordered. Instead they talk about how there’s no In-and-Out franchise in Boston. Here in the kitchen I can see my mom trying her best to make conversation with one of her brothers while one of my aunts apologizes to me for something that happened weeks ago. 婆婆 sits in the corner, picking at her squab.
It seems like none of us know how to talk to each other or how to love each other in the ways we long for. It’s easy to blame the older generations for their flaws as parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents, or to blame my cousins for turning their heads away from the culture, but I’ve learned that that’s just part of the legacy of Chinese immigration. Brokenness. We are all just as scared as the teenager 婆婆 was when she boarded a plane to the US. And still… I will never stop loving my family, even if it hurts just the same as walking on shattered glass.
