As the last month of this awful year begins, I am reminded of one of the funniest cartoons I’ve seen during the pandemic. The cartoon acknowledges that this has truly been the “Year of the Rat”! Another animal on the Chinese zodiac had some fame back in 2011 when the...
We are all counting down to Thanksgiving and recognize that in 2020 the celebration of this holiday will be different because of the pandemic. Some family members may be absent this year from the dining table because of various reasons related to COVID-19. In my...
November is National Family Caregiver Month. For 1.5-generation immigrant children like me, it feels good to be acknowledged for this critical role that so many of us are playing within our families. Most of the Chinese-American families that have immigrated to the...
Every four years as the presidential election season ramps up, I am reminded of what my youngest brother said years ago when he was in elementary school. “I can be president of the United States, and you can’t!” My memories of that incident are too foggy to recall...
After our family immigrated to the United States when I was six years old, I had no problem with starting to use the English name “Lily” because I had already been called “Little Li” after having been given this English name as a toddler in honor of one of my father’s...
Those of us who are 1.5 generation often have some fluency in our heritage language, in my case Mandarin Chinese. Because I left Taiwan before receiving education in the Chinese school system, at home I grew up speaking “Chinglish” – a smattering of Chinese words...
