Helene Kwong: Renaissance Woman

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my relatives: as a toddler, I spent time with my youngest uncle and youngest aunt on my dad’s side until they got married. Then, I spent a lot of time with my siblings and my cousins.

Before my oldest siblings graduated high school, the three of us younger kids played with our oldest brother. One fond memory was playing in our study, where our brother had many of his classical music cassette tapes and our only sound system in the house. We had this large sleeping bag/blue comforter that we laid down on the carpet and pretended it was the ocean. We played Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” piece on the sound system and pretended we were in a sea storm. Our brother turned out the lights so to simulate the conditions of our make-believe.

When we outgrew our sea storm, we went on to discover the world of computer games on our brother’s early Macintosh, which he took to college with him. Still, those games didn’t compare to our imaginative sea storm and Richard Wagner’s piece. I always feel a bit of nostalgia when I hear that piece on the radio.

Out of the five of us Kwong kids, only my brother Adam and me did not wait on tables at our family restaurant (of course, he could prove my memory wrong if he reads this blog post). We both served as hosts, getting customers to their tables, ringing them up at the register, and answering the phone for takeout orders.

When we weren’t doing those tasks and business was slow, we would spend time cleaning silverware and rolling them up in preparation for more customers. The process went like this:

1. Place spoon over fork and put them in the bottom left corner of a square napkin.
2. Fold the bottom left corner of the square over the spoon and fork. Roll silverware over once.
3. Fold the bottom right corner of the square up to cover the bottom tip of the spoon and fork.
4. Fold the top left corner of the square down over the top of the spoon and fork (sometimes, the other employees of the restaurant didn’t do this step, which was fine, but made the silverware more likely to fall out)
5. Continue rolling silverware to your right until tight.

I liked to build little silverware pyramids while I rolled silverware, starting with a base of five silverware rolls. Sometimes I experimented with a larger base of six silverware rolls, but somehow it didn’t feel right.

Rolling silverware was a bit of an escape for me during the long hours of work though; I became so adept at rolling silverware that I went on autopilot with the task and would start to daydream.

Writing out the directions above just went and showed me that I can still roll silverware well, haha! Probably won’t need this skill anymore though.

As I’d mentioned in my previous post, my grandparents had a garden in their backyard when I was a kid. We grew big winter melons and zucchini, pouring smelly fertilizer to help them grow. I remember the tall stalks and how maze-like the whole garden felt.

Both at my grandparents’ and at my house we had college-aged next-door neighbors: mainly frat boys, and they were loud and obnoxious. One time, my sister Lisa and I were in our grandparents’ garden when our noisy next-door neighbors yelled down at us, “HEY!”

My sister Lisa was the first to look and I heard her gasp; I remember she told me, “Sis, don’t look!” But I looked anyway: the guys were mooning us in broad daylight!

That memory has been etched so deeply into our psyche that my sister, who is a poet, wrote a poem about that moment. Her poem is much more descriptive than this blog post here. You can listen to her read this poem and a couple of her other poems at The Poets’ Weave, part of Indiana Public Media.

On Day 7 of #28ChineseMemories, I mentioned how I wore dress shoes a lot when I was a child. These were the only kinds of shoes I really liked, but (before I twisted my ankle), I quickly learned that these shoes weren’t the safest for me to wear.

There were times when I would walk around in my dress shoes in my grandparents’ backyard, which had a paved sidewalk leading up to a concrete platform; all of this was surrounded by lush greenery, and later, my grandparents converted the green area into a large vegetable garden. I would walk or run in the backyard with these shoes on, being a typical little kid.

A couple of times, I fell in the backyard and hit my nose those times. Of course I’d cry and run back inside to get my nose taken care of by an adult. Somehow though, those falls caused my nose to become a running faucet throughout my adolescence…

…because my nose would randomly start to bleed out of nowhere: it happened when I was at home and at school. I felt so embarrassed when my nose started bleeding in school because oftentimes these moments would last awhile and I’d freak my classmates out. I remember my fourth-grade teacher coaching me through how to take care of the nosebleed properly: don’t tip your head back, but lean forward while holding a tissue around your nose.

The worse time was in high school Spanish class, when I was having a one-on-one practice conversation with my classmate and my nose kept bleeding. Finally, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom and later had to clean the desktop off.

Strangely enough, my nosebleed moments stopped after high school, as I don’t recollect any more of these incidents happening in college up to the present. Maybe the curse of the dress shoes wore off?

The Chinese Zodiac is based off of a twelve-year system with corresponding animals for each year. The zodiac years are determined by the lunar calendar, which I had mentioned in my first post of this month. Next week will be the Lunar New Year on February 19th, where we will transition from the Year of the Horse to the Year of the Sheep.

Because the Chinese Zodiac is based on the lunar calendar rather than the solar calendar, the day I was born actually fell into the Year of the Rat, or 1984, despite the fact that my solar birthday is January 31, 1985. The Year of the Ox hadn’t arrived yet in 1985; hence the reason I am considered a Rat and not an Ox.

When I was a child, I didn’t quite understand this concept: I went around telling my friends that I was an Ox but my parents kept correcting me and telling me that no, I was a Rat instead. Growing up and even to this day, my grandparents and my parents like to call me their “little mouse” as a term of endearment and because of my Chinese Zodiac sign.

Recently, I read about the type of personality a person born in the Year of the Rat generally has, and I have to say I do agree with most of what the article described. Still, I have my own quirks and unique traits that can’t be predetermined by the Chinese Zodiac.