THANKSGIVING BLUES

Ilove Thanksgiving cooking videos. Every year, when November rolls around, I spend an indecent amount of time lusting after modernized, stylish iterations of butternut squash and brussels sprouts and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes.Those beautifully choreographed, sunlit, aspirational “tutorials” on the food channels of left-leaning media conglomerates where extremely talented and realistically beautiful chefs lament the ubiquity of bland and boring Thanksgiving fare while simultaneously unable to conceal their absolute adoration for a holiday largely centered around food. They fill a very specific, turkey-shaped void inside of me.

All I want for my future self, really, is an annual Thanksgiving bash-- a multiday affair of prepping, cleaning, cutting, cooking, stressing, eating. It’s my version of Cinderella’s ball, only the carriage is actually a pumpkin. And with no evil stepmother, the only thing stopping me is… well. It’s complicated.

My family’s never really celebrated Thanksgiving, a fact that still somewhat baffles me. We love food, we love gratitude (as much as one can love such a thing), and my mother, at least, is rather keen on the concept of family. But still, we don’t partake in the annual celebrations.

For one, we’ve never really done Thanksgiving food. After much pleading, my mother agreed to make mashed potatoes and a roast chicken when I was 11, but we never did it again. In fact, I distinctly recall that when I was 12, we had Chinese takeout for Thanksgiving dinner. Supporting local businesses, I guess?

As Chinese immigrants, my parents’ palates haven’t quite become accustomed to the American diet. And they shouldn’t be. Chinese food hits different. Hits better, actually. Peking duck is like turkey’s more fashionable, more mature, more generous second cousin once-removed. The food we choose to eat is also a way of retaining and passing down culture. In so many ways, my parents have assimilated: they only communicate in English at work; they consume American media, be it television or books or movies; they wear American clothes: Wrangler Jeans, Nike shoes, Calvin Klein underwear; they’ve owned a Chrysler Town and Country for longer than I’ve lived. But in this small way, they’ve stayed the same. They’ve never learned to like bread more than rice, pasta more than dumplings, and they probably never will. Equally, if not more importantly, they’ve given this morsel of culture to me.

In most aspects of my life, I am more Americanized than my parents. Sometimes, I can only think of how odd it must be for them to look at me, and see-- not as most parents do, a sum that is greater than their parts--- but instead, a strange, fun-house mirror distortion of their beliefs and ideas, one that looks more like a country they’d never seen before they were 21 than the one they were born in. But when we eat together, all of that fades away. I know every dish they do, every flavor they love. Even when I was little and my Mandarin was poor, I could say, in a perfect accent, the names of all the most popular Chinese foods.

As I got older, my worldview expanded, and I came to know more of cuisines beyond my own. Friends graciously accepted me into their homes and shared with me cultures their parents had similarly brought overseas and kept close to their hearts and stomachs. But through all this, my home base and frame of reference is still my dearly beloved Chinese food. Through it, my past seeps into my present every day. Even if my mind can’t always remember my distant lineage and history, my tongue always does. So yeah, we don’t do Thanksgiving food in our house, seeing as it’s the peak of American food culture. But nevertheless, my heart will always yearn for it. I know that it’s really not that good. I know that it’ll make me feel tired and lethargic if I eat more than seven grams of it. But I want it. The other facet of Thanksgiving is family. I think it’s very telling that all the videos I’ve watched and all the aspirations I have about Thanksgiving dinner only ever involve having friends over for a celebration. I rarely think of my family in that context. But that’s what Thanksgiving is about, isn’t it? The fourth Thursday in November is for seeing your third cousins and your great-aunts and not quite knowing what to say to them. It’s for smiling awkwardly at uncomfortable comments made by your wellmeaning but somewhat insensitive grandmother. None of that has been true for me. I spend my fourth Thursday in November with the same two people I’ve

Thanksgiving Blues

spent my whole life up until now with. “Family”, to me, has always been an abstract concept. They’re strangers that I share a slightly higher percentage of DNA with, and does that really matter? If I’ve never met them before, what does it matter that they’d be obligated to help me if I had financial troubles?

I’m an only child with two immigrant parents. My sense of family was predestined to be disjointed. The truth is, if both my parents died, my emergency contact would be a girl my age whom I didn’t know until four years ago. I’d have no meaningful next of kin.

But it’s not all bad. Most of the time, truly, I don’t mind. In some ways, it’s more freeing not to have family members expecting something from you that you can’t give. I feel loved; it makes no difference if it’s by two people or two hundred. It’s only really when Thanksgiving comes that I feel a little more alone. But what about that final pillar? The gratitude that supposedly lives in the soul of this holiday–a quintessentially American kind, a gratefulness for the success of the nation based on the direct contributions of those that it destroyed. The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by immigrants. Allegedly, they were celebrating their cooperation with (read: domination of) the native peoples of this land.

I’m not an acutely grateful person; even as a young child, this story didn’t strike me at my core. I’m also not particularly patriotic; I harbor an internal conflict about the past and future of this country that seems emblematic of this generation. But how can I say that I’m not grateful to be here, in America, when my parents, through an implausible journey of fate and devotion, came to this place for a better life? I’m as cynical as the next person, but I’m also just as susceptible to America’s perfume—it smells like pure, unadulterated potential. The truth is dirtier, messier, more unkind, but the dream, that American one, never stops being beautiful. You have to be in America to access that dream, however corrupted it may be. And I am. I’m here.

The colonizers at the first Thanksgiving were here, too. And I’ll bet they probably felt similarly: vaguely confused and displaced. What they chose to do with that feeling was devastating; they ruined an entire population, shaping the course of history irreparably and unjustly in their favor. They buried their discomfort under the weight of their sins. What will I do with that feeling? I have no clue. Probably not what they did. But I do, oddly enough, have faith that I’ll discover the answer in time. If I’ve learned anything through the course of 15 Thanksgivings, it’s that such a feeling never goes away. I’ll never be from here. I’ll never not be an immigrant’s child. I’ll never see my grandmother during the fall. But I can belong. I can do whatever I want on the third Thursday of November, and whatever I choose will be a reflection of the life I’ve lived, of the matryoshka dolls of lives contained in my history.

A part of me is scared that if I do ever manage to spearhead my own Thanksgiving celebration, I still won’t enjoy it. I know something about the sweet taste of anticipation, and I’m worried that’s what this is. Like Gatsby and his Daisy, maybe I’m only in love with the idea of Thanksgiving dinner. But what if it isn’t? What if it turns out to be everything I dreamed about? Wouldn’t that be worth a shot? Wouldn’t that be beautiful?