My Asian Parent’s Love Language

By Bryan Ly

I went to Rose E. Scala, a pre-K to eighth grade school, which was conveniently a couple of blocks from my grandparents. The classrooms for prekindergarteners were separated from everyone else in the main building across the recess play area, in these big red trailers that reminded me of shipping containers. 5-year-old me thought a train had stopped there and offloaded the trailers. 5-year-old me was dumb.

But 5-year-old me made a crucial decision on a rainy day in that big red trailer. The teacher put down a variety of sliced fruits and let us wander around, trying them all. He decided that day that crisp apples were his favorite fruit — perhaps even his favorite food.

That day I walked home and professed my love for apples for everyone to hear: my friends, my imaginary friends, my parents, my grandparents and Max (my stuffed husky from Build-A-Bear). And in the days following my public declaration, there would be a container of sliced apples on the third shelf from the bottom of the fridge for me to find when I returned from my diligent preschool studies. I thought there must have been something akin to the tooth fairy (an apple fairy … or wizard — yeah, an apple wizard is cooler) who replenished my healthy snack of choice. As I said, 5-year-old me was dumb.

As 5-year-old me became 6, 7, 8, 10 and 13, I consumed a lot of Disney Channel. I soon realized that, aside from the general lack of Asian representation, my family was not like the fictional families on screen. I didn’t get hugs on the regular, dinners or gifts for straight A’s, or “I love you’s” and “I’m proud of you’s.” So I asked myself, is it so wrong to ask for these things?

My parents were both working people, so I barely got to see them as is; when I decided to go to high school in Brooklyn, it meant I would see them even less. The combination of classwork, commuting, extracurriculars and a social life meant I was out of the house from the early morning dew of 6 a.m. to the dimly lit roads of 10 p.m. By the time I got home, they were ready for bed and about to go to sleep. But I always found something when I arrived home — some fruit. On the dinner table was either a container of crisp apples, or a Tupperware of tangerines or a bowl of berries or a drum of dragonfruit. And perhaps it was the work of the apple wizard from my youth. But maybe, the real answer is that there was no patron of the mystical arts of fruit but my parents showing their love for me by leaving fruit. Something “not too sweet” for me to power through my homeworks due tomorrow or satiate my hunger during my procrastination Netflix breaks.

5-year-old me learned that “Actions speak louder than words,” and that container of whatever sliced fruit my mom had picked up at the grocery store meant more to me than any verbal “I love you” because it was my parents’ unique way of saying it.