The Not-So-Secret Diary of a Bad Luck Girl

Well, MB is getting settled in San Francisco.

He flew out yesterday morning and ended up bringing lots of stuff – a giant duffel bag of clothes, his laptop, his guitar, and another case of guitar cables and electronics.  It would have been really tough for him to handle all of that by himself, so I rode in the taxi with him to the airport.  There were some long lines, but his check-in went smoothly, and his flight landed on time.

Since I wasn’t in a rush to get back, I took the Air Train, which was great.  It arrived quickly and is just $5, as opposed to a $45 cab ride.  Then there’s a long subway ride back.  I may do the Air Train/subway option when I return from SF on my three trips this month.  After dropping off my stuff at our SF apartment, I won’t have much to carry on my way back.  Besides, I can’t be spending so much on taxi rides, which usually make me want to barf anyway.

Although I of course already miss MB like crazy, part of me is glad to have a bit of alone time, and the opportunity to sort through all of our stuff exactly the way I want to.  No more asking, “So do you want to keep this random plug/cable/case?” and waiting for an answer.  He’s set aside everything he wants to keep; anything leftover can be donated, tossed, or stored at my parents’.

“You be the judge,” he said.

I love throwing stuff out, as you may have gathered, though sometimes I’m overly enthusiastic and end up wondering where that favorite skirt went.  Surprisingly I’m having a harder time getting rid of my books.  If it was really good, of course I think, I might read it again! even if I never do.

MB said our landlady did a good job cleaning up our SF apartment, and that it’s well-stocked with towels, toilet paper, bedding, and cooking implements.  Having a furnished place does make a sudden cross-country move easier.

Aside from accompanying MB to the airport, YP and I had our monthly photo expedition – maybe the last one!   The theme: Highbridge Park in Washington Heights.  I didn’t take too many pictures, unfortunately: I was pooped after just three hours of sleep and it was SO HOT.  The morning had been chilly so I put on jeans, but by noon time I was roasting.

Other than that I’m still obsessed with selling stuff on Amazon.  I have a ton of CDs, DVDs, and books to ship today.  Yesterday I thought I was all finished inputting MB’s books and CDs, then I realized there’s still a whole box of CDs to deal with.  Tonight I’ll have a lot more energy to tackle that project.

Now that I’m getting ready to move (again!), I’ve been getting rid of tons of stuff. Last time my focus was on clothes, and I managed to donate several giant garbage bags to Housing Works. This time it’s papers, books, CDs, and DVDs.

Over the weekend I was a shredding machine, obliterating piles of junk mail, old receipts, and files. This has been really freeing. Why for years had I been keeping my ATM receipts and keeping track of them in my checkbook? Even with the advent of online checking, I still kept doing this, and then would try to match my checkbook balance to my balance online. Why??? Last month my balance was so off, I finally decided, Fuck it, and no longer collect those receipts in my wallet like some kind of bag lady collecting newpapers to keep her warm at night.

But what’s been most freeing is selling my DVDs. I started collecting box sets of my favorite TV shows – namely, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Gilmore Girls – around the time of my divorce. I didn’t care that reruns for both shows were on all the time. I wanted to be able to watch them whenever I wanted, and to just know that they were there, sitting on my shelf, like a good friend who lives in your town but whom you don’t see very often.

When I moved into in the city, I didn’t have cable right away. So how did I occupy myself every night when I came home to an empty apartment? Watched all my Buffy and Gilmore Girls videos. That was back in 2005, and I probably haven’t watched them again since. But I kept them on my shelf, collecting dust, and didn’t get rid of them when I gave up my place and moved in with MB. We didn’t have much room so I brought them to my office and kept them in a file cabinet. When I changed jobs and offices, I dragged them with me.

Now I’ve sold them off on Amazon. If I made the effort, I could have brought them to San Francisco, or stored them at my parents’ house, but I just don’t need them anymore. It’s not only that I’ve watched all the episodes so many times, I have them memorized, but I feel like they’re from another part of my life, a part that’s behind me. I don’t need Lorelai to comfort me anymore through junk food and witty quips, or Rory to help me feel okay for being nerdy. Buffy no longer has to protect from demons (real or in my head), and I don’t have to gather strength from evil Willow to be a bad ass.

I don’t think it’s as simple as, Now I’m with MB, I don’t need the security of my fave shows anymore. I was probably ready to part with them sooner, the further I moved away from my divorce, the more I remembered who I was outside of a relationship, outside of helping and worrying about other people all the time. I’d like to think by the time I met MB, I had grown (am still growing) and was ready for a relationship.

But not only am I leaving behind some DVDs, I’m leaving an entire city, the city where I met the Ex, got married, got cheated on, and got divorced. Where I started dating again. Now that I’ve resolved that I’m okay with that – not just okay, that I’m excited about it – shucking some TV shows is a piece of cake.

But I’ll still totally watch the reruns on Hulu.

My next memoir post is up.

In this section, I don’t go into too many details about the visit to my cousin’s relatives in Dalian. All that stuff, it seemed, didn’t have a lot to do with the story at hand. In reality it was one of the worst weekends I had in China.

1) My cousin’s relatives were completely freaked out by me. They weren’t related to me – they were cousins on Huang Lei mother’s side – but I still approached them as family. Homesick up the wazoo, I thought one cousin was so much like my younger aunt, while another was like my younger uncle. The eldest reminded me of my mother’s older sister. But whenever I tried to engage myself in their conversations, they froze and backed away. One teenager even left the room whenever I came in. I felt so lonely and alienated that I went into the bathroom and cried.

The only ones who were normal were two younger cousins, both in their early 20s. I hated the girl at first. “Ni hao,” I greeted her when I met her, like any normal Chinese.

“Ni hao!” she repeated, giggling, as though she couldn’t believe this foreigner was speaking Mandarin.

I wanted to smack her.

But when she discovered I wasn’t so different, she was friendly and normal, as was her male cousin.

2) When they weren’t running away from me, they were trying to stuff food down my gullet. This is a normal Chinese practice. At home my mother always puts food on our plates, whether or not we ask, and if we even THINK we might be hungry, she’s there offering treats.

At Huang Lei’s cousins’, it was a billion times worse. You’d be sitting there minding your own business when here came the food. No thank you, you’d say, but they’d think you were just being polite, and would ask a million times more. We kept telling them that since I was American, I didn’t know that kind of politeness, only directness, but they didn’t believe us.

3) The apartment was a 1000 degrees and all the men who smoked. One afternoon, after much insistence that we could take care of ourselves, Huang Lei and I finally made our escape.  The cool sea-tinged air was a tremendous relief.

4) I got terrible food poisoning. “You weren’t supposed to eat the shellfish!” Judy said after my return. Now you tell me. We had everything from mussels, to shrimp, to oysters, to clams. The next day I had dizzy spells, followed quickly by diarrhea and vomiting. Violent and often simultaneous diarrhea and vomiting. It was the worst night of my life.

Everyone assumed it was because I was a foreigner. “She’s not used to eating so much seafood,” they said repeatedly, although I had grown up eating shrimp and fish every week, and had lived in Boston for three years, and even Huang Lei had gotten a little sick herself. But at that point I didn’t even care. They had finally stopped forcing food on me.

Don’t get me wrong. My cousin’s relatives were perfectly nice, and perhaps if I had been more outgoing, they wouldn’t have been so afraid of me. But by then I had had it up to here with China and being seen as different. And it would be YEARS before I could eat mussels again.

“It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.” Erma Bombeck

This weekend MB and I visited my parents.

They’re really happy about MB’s employement and excited about us moving to SF. Well, my dad is; my mother was happy and excited, but now she’s sad and worried.

The sad part I understand. It’ll be the first time I’ve lived far away from home (aside for six months in China), and we won’t be able to pop in for a weekend anymore. But the worried part is annoying.

I know, I know. She’s my mother and she’ll always worry about me. But there’s only so much I can take. First she was worried about MB’s job situation. Now that he’s got one, she’s worried that we’ll break up.

Why is she worried about this? Have we been arguing in front of her? Do I seem unhappy? Does he act surly and uncommunicative? No, no, and no. In fact we’re sickeningly PDA, even in front of them; I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time; and he’s always his open, friendly self with them, helping them with everything from the infamous skylight blinds, to fixing the automatic garage door, to trouble shooting their Mini Mac set up.

Still, she’s worried.

“Are you sure about the relationship?” she asked me while my dad and MB were out in the garage.

Yes, I told her. We’re both 100% sure. Can either of us see the future? No. But what kind of present would we have if we’re constantly worried about what might happen years from now?

Of course I can understand why she’s worried. Look at my track record. Although now she says I should have known, the Ex’s affair and our divorce were blows out of nowhere to her. So she feels if she worries, she will keep such unforeseen disasters at bay.

I’m the same way. When I feel I don’t have control, I kick into worrying mode, even if there’s no reason to. Worrying for no reason sucks the life out of you, and casts an air of misery. Worriers are no fun to be around. Of course there’s constructive worrying, ie, worrying about a problem for which there is an actual solution. But there is no solution to the problem of “We have no idea what the future will bring us.”

I’ve told my mother this many times. She sees my point and can even laugh at herself, but when faced with the unknown, she begins the worrying cycle again.

I tried telling her the main reason the Ex and I broke up, aside from his messing around, was that we wanted different things. He wanted to make lots of money and acquire a house and status among his peers. I wanted to pursue my non-money making dream and see the world, which is what MB wants (though his dream has more money-making potential than mine).

Still, that didn’t stop my mother from having “the talk” with MB. Night owls, they were both still up after my father and I had turned in. She let him know her worries and asked him if we’d be together for a long time and not to hurt me. He was nice and reassuring, giving her a hug because she looked upset. Then she asked yet again about marriage.

My mother has told only three people, aside from family, that I’m divorced. As far as her friends know, I’m still with the Ex, and they think the Ex is the one who has gotten a job in San Francisco and that’s why we’re moving.

I hate this but also understand. MB is so great I want everyone to know I’m with him. But I also know my mother’s friends are total busybodies, would ask a zillion nosy questions about what happened with the Ex, and put doubts in her mind about MB. “Are you sure he won’t be just like the Ex? Maybe your daughter shouldn’t jump into a relationship so fast. Are you sure she’s moving to SF because she really wants to? Are you sure he’s not forcing her?”

Yentas.

“I’ll tell them when you get married,” she said.

I sighed. “Well, then I guess you’ll never tell them.”

In a way she cares more about what her friends think than what makes me happy, but “saving face” is such a big deal in Asian culture, I can’t even blame her for it. It would be a HUGE change for her to put her kids’ happiness before how we appear to others (although my dad has never given a rat’s ass about saving face). I’ve told her a zillion times how I feel about marriage – at best, apathetic – and MB told her his feelings that night. Some people love it, but it’s not for us for varying and complex reasons. The only reason I’d do it is to make her happy, and that is NOT a good reason to make such a life-changing decision. It’s not like wearing sweater A instead of sweater B.

MB was honest with her, and thinks she understands. I’m glad he understands. Other people would be defensive and pissed off, but he was just concerned that she seemed sad and worried.

During my marriage, I told him, she never spoke up. This time she doesn’t want to look back and regret not having said anything.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I’d rather have that.” Rather that than passive aggressive stewing and snide remarks.

Demons of our own making, that’s what worrying is. Nothing has happened in this relationship to make my mother worry, but because things happened in the past in another relationship, therefore she must worry. I did too, and will probably continue to do so, if not about me and MB, then about other things, and I’ll try to remind myself to live in the present, focus on what I know, and that worrying will get me nowhere, just like a rocking chair.

Dear Shirt:

I hate you today. I ironed you but you’re still wrinkled. You’re a petite but your arms are long enough for an orangutan. Plus why are your buttons so hard to unbutton? You’d think you were a straight jacket, a business casual straight jacket.

Dear Ass, Stomach, and Thighs:

Why are you so big lately? You’re practically bursting out of your clothes! Surely my eating more and exercising less has nothing to do with it.

Dear Hair:

Don’t tell me it’s time for another haircut! What the fuck? You’re all dry and already approaching mullet stage. Plus I’m tired of you. I dreamed the other night that you were long and soft. But instead you’re coarse and stick up all over my head in the morning like some kind of anime character’s. Maybe you need to be a bob.

Dear Pants Hangers I Bought at the Container Store Yesterday:

I can’t believe you can’t even hold a pair of pants without the pants falling off, or the little holder things spontaneously disengaging. No wonder you were only $1.99. Then again, the free pants holders from Lord & Taylor are the shit. Explain me that.

Dear Buses:

I hate you too. Why do you come three or four in a row, instead of staggered? Why do you insist on blasting your A/C? Also, the other day, why did you wait FOREVER for that one guy to count change from his PLASTIC BAG? Seriously, you call yourself a New Yorker?

Dear Work Computer:

I might hate you worst of all. Why do you take a year to open Outlook? And why is the sound card suddenly not working? Why do I have to click things a billion times for them to open? Why do you freeze when I open sites like Gawker and Jezebel (not that I’m looking at those sites at work, of course not!)? Or when I try to write a very important, surely work-related post in WordPress or Twitter?

Everyone, I’m telling you all this for your own good. I hope to see you shape up or ship out.

Hating your guts,

The Bad Luck Girl

Dear Elizabeth:

I feel for you, girl. Not only did your husband cheat on you while you were sick, he supposedly got the whore knocked up. After all you had done for him, being there for him throughout his career, raising the kids. Yet you still took him back. You went on tour talking about what a dick he was, but yeah, you took him back.

But now. A DNA test proves the kid is his. Hell, he’s supposed to announce it himself at some point. But not only that: he wants to move the whore and kid to YOUR TOWN so he can be an active part of the kid’s life. Why not just move them into your goddamned house? Understandably, you were thrown for a loop. You were outraged. You packed a bag.

But Elizabeth, girlfriend: it’s time to let go for good. Do you want to stay with this for the rest of your life? To have rubbed in your face constantly what he did? To be reminded every single day that he has chosen them (the whore, the child) over you?

No, you’re worth more than that. You of all people know life is short. Leave him; move on. I know you feel like if you do, they’re “winning,” that they’ll have this happy life while you’re left all alone (believe me, I know how that is). But while you hang on, refusing to “lose,” it will eat you up inside. There will be nothing left but black, bitter ashes.

It’s not a good feeling.

Maybe you’ll feel like you’ll having nothing in your life after you leave. But you will: you’ll have peace. You’ll have freedom from suffering, if you can let go completely. Be with your kids. Write your next memoir. Call it Redemption: Leaving the Burdens and Adversities of Life Behind You.

I’m still working on my own peace. Can you tell? I’m still somewhat bitter, five years later. But I’m less mad at the woman now and angrier with my ex and his family – after all I did, this is how you repay me. (But I’m glad I never asked for alimony. Not amount of money is worth keeping that bullshit in my life.) I’m not saying don’t be mad at the who – I mean, woman. She knew what she doing, that John was married. But he knew what he was doing too.

I know it’s easier to be mad at her than him, to dismiss her as below you (which she most probably is), but it’s not about below or above, who’s better or worse. I don’t know why he did it, but he did. Either you can stay and try to figure out why, or you can leave and have a life for yourself.

You call what he did “an error in judgment” and “a terrible decision.” Lizzie, please. “An error in judgment” is thinking you’ll make it to JFK from mid-town in less than an hour on a Friday afternoon. “A terrible decision” is buying a shoddy house with no savings. Do you think he stood there in her hotel room, and mulled it over? “Hmm, should I or shouldn’t I?” Paper or plastic? Boxers or briefs (I’m picturing boxers)?

I’m here to tell you: he had it planned. He thought he’d be able to get away with it. Or else he was so empty inside that he thought sooner or later, everything would fall apart anyway, so who cares?

The purpose of this isn’t to say you’re the good guy and he’s the bad one (though honestly: Team Elizabeth all the way). It’s to tell you to salvage the rest of your life.

Some people might blame you for what he did. You seemed so overbearing after all; there were rumors that you were practically like Mussolini. Maybe the same shit is being said about me. “The Ex is such a nice guy, surely she drove him to it.”

But you know what? It doesn’t matter.

All that matters is that you leave now.

Best wishes,

The Bad Luck Girl

I know I’m a bit late to the game, but I had to give my two cents on the article published in Marie Claire last week, The New Trophy Wives: Asian Women.

I first heard about this piece through Catherine_Sr.’s blog. I was still in San Francisco in vacation mode so I didn’t want to read the article right away, assuming I’d get really upset. I finally read it a day or two later, and as I wrote in the comments section of the Marie Claire website:

reading this article, i was prepared to be angry and offended. however, i’m mostly just shocked at how poorly written it is. it’s as though the author simply rattled off a bunch of headlines, common stereotypes, and personal assumptions, smashed it all together, and called it an article.

Basically the author (an Asian woman, btw) lists a dozen well-known old white guy-younger Asian woman couples, then finds a half a dozen ways to say ”ew.” Then she tries to “explain” these relationships through a variety of stereotypes, for example:

“Asian kids’ intrinsic work ethic”

a) What does this even mean? that these Asian women worked really hard to snag their sugar babas? and b) I’m sorry but I was pretty freaking lazy as a kid, and coasted because I went to an upper middle class school that expected me to excel.

“power divorcés of a certain ilk make the perfect renegade suitors for these overachieving Asian good girls — an ultimate (yet lame) attempt at rebellion?”

These women probably are overachievers – aside from being married to Rupert Murdoch, Wendi Deng is also a Yale graduate, and do you think Zhang Ziyi will be best known for marrying some random white rich guy, or the fact that she was in freaking Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? But marrying some old rich dude hardly seems rebellious. Marrying the pool boy, on the other hand. . .

“Maybe these outsized, world-class moguls are stand-ins for emotionally repressed Asian dads (one cliché that is predominantly true)”

Predominantly true based on what? A story in your head? Your own daddy issues? How about the rest of us billion and a half Asians around the world? My dad for one is the emotional one, and my mom the hardass, a cliche which I find predominantly true among the Asians I know.

Of course I have my own theories as to why there seem to be a lot of Asian women-white guy relationships (seem being the operative word here), like that we all actually marry our mothers, not our fathers, and with so many Asian moms being skerry badasses, both women and men look for that. Not that white guys are skerry badasses (HARDLY), but, and I’m sorry but Asian men will hate me for this, a guy raised by a badass mom will more likely be a momma’s boy. (Not that I know all half a billion Asian men, so there goes that.)

Plus with a white guy?  No even-skerrier, even bad-asser ASIAN MOTHER-IN-LAW.  Duh, duh, duuuh!  An Asian mother-in-law who expects you to cook and clean, to wait on her precious boy, hand and foot.

But really who knows why anyone is together? Even as I wrote the above, it seemed dumb and full of holes and colored by my own experiences.

While there’s no denying that 1) Asian women-white guy relationships do exist, and 2) some non-Asian guys have fetishes, do not tell me that while dating a white guy, I “may not know if it’s a fetish thing.”  As Disgrasian says it so well in the Huffington Post:

Um, excuse me? Really? So Asian women are not only submissive Suzie Wongs and geishas, we’re also fucking brain-dead, too?

The complications of sexual politics notwithstanding, fetishists are easy to spot. They come at you with their prayer-bead bracelets and their suspiciously in-depth knowledge of your “culture.” They come with transparent dating histories, and many of them are more than happy to offer up that their last eight girlfriends have been Asian. . .

Um, yeah, I’ve been there. Dated a guy whose last three girlfriends were Japanese. The icing on the cake was when he spoke Japanese to me by mistake – during sex. Red flag, anyone? (Then again, the last three guys I dated plus my current boyfriend are all white, and we speak English all the time! Does that mean I have a fetish?)  Disgrasian goes on:

[Fetishists] unabashedly expound–based on their dating experience alone–on the fundamental difference between, say, Korean women and Chinese women. Fetishists tend to talk about you like you’re only a member of a larger group; e.g. instead of saying, “I really like your shiny hair,” they’ll say, “I really like Asian girls’ hair.” And, frankly, they’re creepy, like noticeably-remarkably-right-off-the-bat-creepy, like konichiwa-ni hao ma-what are you?-as-an-opening-line creepy, and stalk-you-on-Facebook-where-they-have-381-friends-who-all-happen-to-be-Asian-women-creepy, and follow-you-to-your-car-in-a-parking-garage-after-you’ve-shared-two-minutes-riding-an-elevator-together-creepy. It’s not rocket science, people.

And if we’re going to traffic in stereotypes here, did Marie Claire forget that Asians are supposed to be smart, too?

Haha, good one!

What makes the clueless-fetishized-Asian-woman statement even more annoying is that it’s by an Asian American woman.  I know just the self-righteous type too.  My college was full of them.  Hell, I was one of them, looking down at Asians who dated whites (but not blacks or Latinos, that was almost a step up, like somehow that made you even more a person of color, cuz, let’s face it, us Asians are probably the least colored on the people of color rainbow).

Look, I’m not going to go on to insist that my current white (YOUNGER) boyfriend doesn’t have a fetish. But if you think he does, and that my being Asian is the main reason he’s with me, then you’re saying that I have no or few other redeeming qualities. You have reduced our relationship – our best friend-ness, our family-ness – to a stereotype.  And to that I say, Fuck you.

But to say that race has nothing to do with at least our initial attraction to each other is naive.  Why people are drawn to each other is complex.  Maybe you’ve grown up on an island with a 90% Asian population and all your crushes were on Asian girls.  Or maybe you’re from an Italian/Jewish neighborhood and all the boys you liked had bat mitzvahs or Communion.  But that’s only the initial draw. It’s not what keeps a relationship going.

Basically it’s useless to make conjectures about why people are together.  I can look at some old white scrawny dude with a mullet and a young Asian hottie and think, Girl, you could do so much better!  But maybe she can’t.  Or maybe she likes being fetishized; maybe she fetishizes pale skinny guys with bad haircuts and nosehair.  Or maybe it’s just love. You never know.

Excellent. Bring your dramamine though.

I’ve never really thought of myself as a jealous person. Competitive yes, and ambitious about some things. Hell, my Chinese name comes from the idiom, “When one sees an admirable person, one wants to emulate that person.”

But wanting to emulate someone you admire isn’t the same as being jealous of that person. Jealousy: a feeling of grudging admiration and desire to have something that is possessed by another.

For a long time, I was jealous of my cousin Huang Lei.

Growing up, my mother constantly compared to me her friends’ kids.  Why couldn’t I be skinny like this one, or outgoing like that one? Why couldn’t I be pre-med instead of a poet? On top of that, I had thought of some of the kids I grew up with as good friends, only to discover that they basically considered me some kid they knew.

When I met my cousin Huang Lei, I assumed she’d be like these childhood friends. But she wasn’t at all. From the moment she and her husband picked me up at the Beijing airport, I was like the American sister she never had.

The Chinese have a term, neng-gan: capable, talented, clever. To my family Huang Lei was very neng-gan: she could cook up a storm, pick out the freshest, cheapest vegetables at the market, debone a fish with her eyes closed. Me, on the other hand – sheme dou bu hui. There was nothing I knew how to do – I couldn’t cook beyond a stir fry, didn’t know a good tomato from a bad – especially in China.

Although I was 26 years old, I had never been abroad, and so surrounded by people speaking a Mandarin I could barely understand, who thought I was some weird Chinese-mask wearing foreign monster, and not knowing how anything worked (no lines? really? just a mob in front of the next ticket window? no trying on shoes right on the floor but on a random piece of cardboard? what, no supermarket but some far-off farm where I’m supposed to carry home eggs in a handkerchief in my bike basket?), I was deemed completely clueless, perhaps even slightly retarded.

It’s true that I let myself get completely dependent on my cousins.  I was so freaked out – by culture shock and by being expected to teach, with zero assistance, almost 150 students – I didn’t bother doing anything for myself, at least not till the end when friends visited and I led us all over Beijing.

But after a while people’s surprise at what I could do was ridiculous. Yes, sometimes you have to hold up a door handle when shutting it to keep it locked. Yes, I can play a simple game of Concentration. And then that bit with dousing the hot of a hotpot.

Despite what my family thought, in America I considered myself very capable. While I had a phobia of driving, I could maneuver the subway like no one’s business. I could fly all over the country by myself. I could run a meeting with 2000 people. In America I was Queen, surely better than Huang Lei, surely more neng-gan.

Then I found out my cousin was coming to America.

At first my family was appalled that – and here comes a spoiler for those of you who don’t know the story – she had left her seemingly kind husband for Ron and Judy’s son, but soon enough my grandmother changed her tune. My cousin was neng-gan again! Just for being in the right place at the right time, for being lucky enough to fall in love.

I was obsessed with how she’d have to adjust. “She’ll have to learn English,” I said to my mother. “She’ll have to learn how to drive.”

“She’ll be able to,” my mother said. “Maybe she’ll be better than you.”

Great. All I needed was for my Chinese cousin to live my American life better than me.

When I visited Huang Lei in Portland, I became jealous for a different reason. She and Shane were so in love, it was sickening. I owe you one kiss, a Post-It on their cupboard said. “Do you see something beautiful?” Shane asked holding up the shiny silver tray his parents’ had given them to catch Huang Lei’s reflection. “I do.” I cringed as they blew kisses at each other from across the room.

But I was also sad. I was a newlywed too, but I didn’t have anything like that. I told myself it didn’t matter, that my husband and I had a quiet love, which was true at the beginning, but even just a few months after we married, I knew was less true.

In the end I found out that my cousin and I had even more in common than I thought, and while others would continue to compare us (like Shane who insisted his wife was much more fashionable than I was, although we were wearing practically the same thing), I’d still think of her as the Chinese sister I never had.