When I wrote that Tiger Mom related post last month, I was reminded of the identity struggles I grew up with as a first generation Asian-American. I often felt that I was straddling between 2 cultures, never completely one nationality or the other. Often I felt like I was expected to behave one way with my family, which sometimes conflicted with what I felt was the “American” way of doing things.

I’m a US citizen, but I wasn’t born here. I came to NYC in the 70s with my dad when I was 3 and reunited with my mom who had already been working here as a nurse for 2 years when she left Korea when I was a year old (a different story for another day). Immigrating to America when you’re 3 is a lot different than immigrating to America when you’re 8, which is when many of my younger cousins came. At 3, you’re just starting to grasp language skills. Throw in a move to a foreign country where suddenly everyone is speaking a different language and you have some confusion at a critical time when you’re learning how to speak. Not surprisingly, I am not fluent in Korean and what I do know was learned at Korean school in my later years. My cousins who came when they were older, on the other hand, can speak the language fairly well. Because of this, I felt there was always a cultural and language divide among my large family of cousins – those who were born in the US and those who came at a later age, 8 or older. I related most with my cousins who were born here since I came at such an early age and I had no real memories of Korea.

Even though the few early memories I have of coming to NY were somewhat traumatic, kids adapt to new environments fairly quickly and soon I was just about as American as any other kid on the block. Back then, in the 70s, you didn’t really want to be different even in a diverse city like NY. I assimilated into American culture so I could fit in like everyone else and even my name, my full name, was given to me by my mom because it was the most popular name of that era (Jennifer). By the time I hit public school, I was choreographing dance numbers with my friends to the BeeGees, becoming obsessed with the Jackson Five, and developing crushes on Leif Garrett and the members of the Bay City Rollers just like any other American kid in the 70s. I remember being really frustrated, however, because my parents weren’t aware of so many “American things” like the tooth fairy. When I lost my first tooth, I hid that that thing under my pillow and checked every morning, only to discover that my tooth was still there. Finally after a few fruitless nights, I took that tooth and marched over to my mom and told her all exasperated, “you’re supposed to be the tooth fairy! You have to leave me a quarter under my pillow! Why don’t you know this?!”.

At some point my parents thought it would be a good idea to reacquaint myself with Korean culture, so the one and only time I ever went back to Korea was in 1981. I was part of the first government sponsored trip of about 20 or so Korean-American students ranging from age 10-17 and we stayed with host families for a month. We toured the country together, learned about history, culture and traditions, and then I stayed on for another month with my relatives. In Korea, I was paraded around by my cousins as their “American cousin”. Their friends bought it because my hair wasn’t jet black and I wore fat red shoe laces on my Nike sneakers. At age 11, I remember getting into a fight with my mom prior to the trip about what to wear to the airport, where some of our relatives would be meeting me for the first time since I left the country. My mom wanted me to wear a dress and look nice, to show respect for my relatives. I wanted to wear jeans and a logo t-shirt, either Sassoon or Jordache, which was really popular back in those days. I knew all my other friends on the trip would be wearing the same. I guess I won that battle because my mom did eventually let me go in jeans and a t-shirt, but I also remember my Korean relatives expressing bewilderment at my “coming home” outfit.

I know most kids go through wardrobe battles with their parents, but for me and probably other first generation immigrants, it was also about something more, something deeper than the clothing. At home, we were taught never to forget our ethnic heritage, but at school, I did my best to not remind myself or others of my Asian-ness so I could fit in. It was also a defense mechanism to avoid any racial teasing because as an Asian-American, or the so-called “model minority”, there were all these stereotypes that we were geeks, adding to the pressure and expectations to be academic overachievers. To many Americans, we were also lumped together into one group. It didn’t matter if you were Japanese or Korean or Chinese. Back then, if you looked Asian, you were automatically assumed to be Chinese no matter how many times you clarified that you were not and that being Korean was in fact, different from being Chinese. This just added to the overall identity confusion. Was I Asian? Was I Korean? Was I American?

Growing up was always about that push and pull between 2 cultures. It made me think twice about doing really normal teenage things like going out on dates in high school or bringing a boyfriend home, neither of which I did when I lived at home. There’s a reason why neither my brother or I told my dad about our respective partners until we were ready to get married. I always wished I grew up in an American family where normal things like that wasn’t such a big issue and so complicated. I totally laugh about this now, but I used to worry all the time about how I would disappoint my parents whenever I decided to break it to them that I was planning on being a rockstar when I grew up. I was serious too and that stress was real, but we didn’t have those kind of role models growing up that I could point to. Asians played classical violin or piano at Carnegie Hall, but you never saw them on MTV, or movies or television shows back when I was a kid. And if you did see the rare Asian in popular culture, it was always a role that perpetuated stereotypes (Long Duk Dong in 16 Candles, anyone?).

But a really unexpected thing happened when I left my NYC art school to a attend a small town liberal arts college in Washington State. There were all these student groups that were organized by ethnicity. There were Students of Color. There were the Pan-Asian and Asian-American Coalitions. This was a new thing for me and I joined in on some events and meetings because I was encouraged to do so, but it was a jarring experience. Suddenly, it was all about Asian Pride and that just didn’t exist in the 70s and 80s. I can’t say that I felt entirely comfortable in these student groups. It’s sort of the same experience when I compare it to going to Koreatown and not being able to speak to anyone in Korean. You’re looked down on and there’s this air of disapproval. Suddenly I didn’t feel Asian enough because I didn’t know the language well enough, or the history and I wasn’t actively engaging in any of the traditions.

Needless to say, it’s been a long journey to get to where I am now, where I no longer feel uncomfortable straddling two cultures. By the time I moved back to NY and went to grad school, I was hanging out with more Asian-American friends than I ever had in my life, but we were all a bit older and we weren’t dealing with so much identity angst from our childhood and college years. It was just fun to go out and have group karaoke night in Koreatown, or organize a game of Mahjong on the 4th floor of the Tisch building or have dimsum in Chinatown.

Now that I’m a parent, I realize that it must have been hard for my parents too, to balance the traditions and expectations with a world they had just left while assimilating into the culture of a new home in America.
I think it does say something about the world (or maybe it’s our part of the world) that the issues I dealt with growing up haven’t been on my mind at all. While the sad truth remains that some of those traditions will fade as our family continues to grow into second and third generation Americans (not to mention the whole multiracial aspect of both my children and my brother’s kids), I’m doing my best to teach and remind the kids about their various ethnic roots and what being American means. I wasn’t born American, but in 1984 I chose to be. I stood there with other soon-to-be Americans in a courtroom and took that oath in a Naturalization Ceremony. Was I still Asian? Yes. Was I still Korean? Yes. Was I American? Officially, as of that oath, yes. I guess it just took many years to realize that I am all of these things.

I’m not much of a party goer these days, but I was thinking about all the various parties that I went to when I was younger in school. Those all night parties were epic, particularly when you were 18 and living on your own. At the time, you felt like you knew it all at that age, but of course when you look back, 18 seems so young, a child really. I didn’t even intend on moving out of my childhood home in Queens when I first went to college. The intention was to commute every day with my best friend who had also gotten into the same art school as me. We would drive in her hand-me-down yellow car, park at a lot and take the train to the East Village the rest of the way in. The commute, however, was long and stressful. We’d sweat bullets every morning as we nervously stared at our watches, praying that we wouldn’t be late to our first class. The ride back home was often late, sometimes past 10pm as we’d have to stay in school to finish our projects due the next day. One day on the way home, we got off the train in the evening and looked for her car. We would always joke that maybe one day the car wouldn’t be there waiting for us. That evening we looked…and looked…but no car. Apparently it had been stolen. Our parents decided then that it was time we moved to Manhattan to be closer to school and so we did, to an apartment in Chinatown just 5 or so weeks into the school year.

I still remember the moment my mom called when she got home after helping me move my things. She was sitting on my bed sort of dazed. I can still even picture her sitting in that empty, black room (yes! I had black walls in my room in high school). Now that I have girls of my own, I can’t really imagine how weird that must have been for her. I, on the other, hand, felt a whole other range of emotions. I don’t think anyone ever forgets their “firsts” and I’ll certainly never forget the first time I stayed out all night with my art school friends till dawn, walking home at 5am towards the breaking sun rays over Lafayette Street one October morning. The city hadn’t quite woken up yet. The view down that street looking South bathed by those streaming sun rays is forever burned in memory and I don’t think I had ever felt more alive until that moment.

There would be many many, more parties and late nights after that. Some of those nights were spent at the studios up in school on the 6th floor as we worked on our color theory assignments. This usually involved painting color swatches and a lot of ColorAid paper. My friends and I would get some veggie sushi rolls at the Korean deli for dinner and work through the night. Sometimes we’d quit close to midnight and go skipping down Broadway like reckless idiots to Soho, back when Soho was still a gallery inhabited art haven, to bars and watch bands play music. Other nights we’d find ourselves on the Upper West Side in a grand Classic 7 apartment, at a party with the most eclectic mix of people who helped opened our eyes to the world.

And my first Halloween party? Theater for the New City’s annual Costume Ball, the first year and every year after that (and can I tell you how happy it makes me to see that it’s still being held to this day over 20 years later? Some East Village traditions have remained!). The Halloween party at the theater was this wild multi-level, multi performance, cabaret, art filled extravaganza. My friends and I would sneak in through the back door as we usually knew someone who was performing there that night. What I remember the most about these parties, however, is feeling so much like Alice in Wonderland wandering around the cavernous theater spaces and a maze of smaller, nested rooms full of colorful people and psychedelic colors. Sometimes I really miss the East Village of the late 80s.

What I was remembering today as I was flipping through some old photos were these mid-winter parties that took place at the Sideshow by the Seashore Building in Coney Island, a fun house of sorts. They would happen around this time of year, in February. Living in the East Village during those years, these parties were the only time I’d venture into Brooklyn until I moved there a few years later. There’s something about being on the beach in winter, looking at the horizon and seeing the long stretch of sand. I remember the seagulls were always really aggressive, as was the wind and the surf, but it felt so invigorating to be on the ocean in the dead of winter to wake yourself up from cabin fever and the winter blues.

It’s amazing how we could party almost every night back in those days, always seeking out the next show, the next party. Those parties have mostly been replaced now by pink sprinkles, balloons and cupcakes. Sometimes I have to laugh. When you’re 18, you never think that you’d end up here.

Blah blah, Tiger Mom, blah blah. After reading the WSJ excerpts, every X/Y generation Asian-American comes forward with their own war stories! Westerners are appalled! It’s old news by now so why do I bring this up now? I admit that I didn’t read the original article till rather recently. I snorted and dismissed it when I saw the title “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior”. But then, you know, a rap song came out…and parodies… and memes, so I finally followed a link and read the essay (here you go if you’ve been living under a rock). None of it was shocking, but not because I was raised by a Tiger mom (this phrase is seriously cringe-worthy, btw). My mom always used to tell me that she wasn’t strict, that she pretty much let us do whatever we wanted and that she didn’t pressure us to bring home good grades. When I was a kid I used to roll my eyes whenever she would say this, but in looking back, yeah…I think she was right.

So why did my brother and I seem like near perfect examples of your stereotypical overachiever, Asian kid if we weren’t raised with the same kind of overzealous, extreme parenting style that Amy Chua represents? Here, let’s go down the list:

1. Piano lessons – check! (ok, so neither my brother or I played Carnegie Hall when we were 15, but I did audition for the school band with a cover of Rush’s Subdivisons on keyboards. That has to count for something, right? (btw, that video is a FINE piece of visual social commentary on the mediocrity and conformity of suburban existence. You know, if you can get past Geddy Lee looking straight at you with that hair.)

2. School spelling bee champ – check! (ok, so I didn’t advance on the next round in the Queens Catholic school regionals. I lost to a girl who had a million new wave band buttons on her uniform vest. I’m telling you, I was distracted by all those faces of Martin Gore and John Taylor looking back at me).

3. Valedictorian in Junior High School – check!

4. Top 5% in my high school class – check! (our high school used to post our academic rankings for each grade in the hallway of our school, all the way from #750 in last place to #1. Great for self esteem! Seriously, what was the point of making that public only to humiliate the bottom 5% and make the top 5% feel smug?)

5. Full scholarships to art schools – check! (ooooh, wait. back up! Asian kids aren’t allowed to study art for reals as careers, only as hobbies…or are they?)

My brother had more of a math oriented route in his adolescent academic career. He was the kid who got near perfect scores on his Math SATs and who got into the most competitive high school in NYC where 50% of the student body is Asian (I’m not even making that statistic up).

So I tell you all this because we were pretty stereotypical Asian-American kids. Aside from the academic stuff, we never dated in high school, never rebelled or disobeyed our parents, but according to my mom, it’s not because my parents were super strict and hard core. Sure, they made us go to Saturday test preps courses for 3 years, both for high school entrance exams and the SATs – pretty much every Asian kid did, but from my honest recollection, I’d have to agree with her. And yet both my brother and I were really hard on ourselves. I can’t totally speak for him, but I don’t think either of us would have settled on less than being “the best”. I was a competitive, type A all the way student who would dwell for days on the rare event that I got an A minus or slipped a mistake on a piano recital.

So where does this come from if it doesn’t come directly from our parents? I don’t recall it being touched upon in any of the discussions I read that followed the Tiger Mom crap, but I think there is this whole other universally larger, culturally and genetically ingrained Tiger “gene”. I think it’s 1 part fear of being seen as a cultural failure – you know, that 1 aberrant Asian kid who gets bad grades in school, 1 part fear of disappointing our parents, and 1 part peer pressure from all these stereotypes. We’re Asian. We’re expected to get good grades and play the piano because everyone tells us so. The media tells us, our family tells us, every Asian kid getting into Harvard tells us. And so even if my parents didn’t adopt the Amy Chua style of extreme Asian parenting, the undercurrent of all that it represented was there. My brother and I just happened to be the ones to discipline ourselves into more practicing and more studying. I guess the key thing here is that we *didn’t* want to find out what would happen if we brought home bad grades. Even if my parents weren’t the ones to strictly enforce it, the pressure to excel was still there.

Even with all that internal pressure that my brother and I put upon ourselves, I commend my parents for recognizing certain signs and not pushing us in directions that would have otherwise been too much. My brother went to a state university, albeit a very good one, and it was a conscious decision on my parents’ part to not push him into going to an Ivy League college even though he had the grades to make it. I think we all recognized that the pressure might just be too much given how so intensely hard he was on himself and that he would fare better in a smaller, SUNY school. Later on, when he was more mature, he did apply to all the top Med and Vet schools and attend an Ivy league University, but he was ready.

On my side of the story, my parents were always very supportive of my choice to study art, but I did what most Asian parents would consider the cardinal sin of Asian-ness: drop out of school. It took me 3 years to do it and the only reason why I stuck around for so long was because I was afraid of my parents’ reaction. When I did tell them over the phone that day in April, right before the finish of my 3rd year at Cooper, they were relatively calm. They told me to come home in a few days to discuss it. (Oh, and I also told them I was leaving NY as well to go “traveling”. Shazaam! Double doozy!). My parents sat me down at the kitchen table and my dad, who remained calm after avoiding me for a day while I was home, just made me promise that I would go back to school and finish my degree. I’ll still remember the day my dad and I had that talk. I’ll also never forget the day that I left NY and into the unknown for the 8 months of traveling I did before I went back to school. I went to say goodbye to him at his wig store in Midtown. He had tears in his eyes. I hadn’t ever intended to go back to school prior to that point, but at that moment, I decided that I would, and I did, and even got a graduate degree later on. I honestly can’t say that my dad really contributed to our parenting, but he was definitely of the school that you disciplined your kids through fear. The fact that he didn’t beat my ass when I dropped out of school spoke volumes, and this is why I went back.

All of these experiences shape you as a parent. There are things you vow to do differently and there are things that you admire your parents for and want to adopt. I’m definitely not a Tiger mom, but my mom does seem to think that I’m a little more strict with the girls than she was with us. To be honest, I’m sort of surprised at how mellow I am on the parenting front – I’m not rushing to get my kids tested at age 5 to see if they qualify for the Gifted & Talented schools, for example. I barely batted an eye over that one, but it remains to be seen whether or not I’ll continue the Asian-American tradition of enrolling my kids into multiple years of SAT test preps (just kidding, girls. ok, maybe just 1 year). I’m not even stressing yet over the fact that Mia seems to have a lackadaisical attitude about homework (she hates it) and wants to throw in the towel too fast when something’s too hard. Tiger mom would have already dished her a verbal beat down. What I’m taking away from my own upbringing is that it’s okay to gently nudge, to set expectations high, but ultimately let the kids lead their own way, with guidance. I can even argue that Mark had a completely different upbringing and childhood than I did, but in the end, we kind of ended up in the same place as adults. Even if I did have a few years of “crazy” behavior after high school, which I’m sure my mom would rather prefer not to remember, I ended up ok. My kids will too.

I’ll end this super long post now, but I do want to leave you with one quote from Betty Liu, a Journalism Professor at NYU, who recommends reading the memoir of Zappos’ founder over Tiger Mom’s:

“…there’s a dirty little secret about these lunatic, prestige-whoring Chinese parents that Chua represents. For all their lusting after the elitism of Ivy League degrees, what they admire more than anything is financial success.”.

Oh lawd, I never laughed so hard…because truer words have never been spoken. Look, Tiger Mom isn’t stupid. Defensive back-pedaling or not, that article made news, BIG news and the book is selling like gangbusters. Tiger Mom is laughing all the way to the bank.

When I was in my 20s, moving around from house to house, apartment to apartment, from city to city was a standard way of life. Like many people that age, I don’t think I ever lived in a single place for more than a year. 2 years spent in a single home or neighborhood was rare and by the end of that stint, the itch for a change would be overwhelming and it was time to move again. It’s really hard to fathom settling down in one place when you’re in your 20s.

This year is officially the year that we’ll call our current apartment home longer than any place either of us have lived outside of our childhood homes. We bought this apartment in 2004 and moved in the spring of 2005. We didn’t move far though. Exactly 8 blocks north in the same Park Slope neighborhood we’ve lived in for the last 11 years.

Yeah, Park Slope. Have you heard of it? It’s that neighborhood that always gets slammed by New Yorkers and other people who think they know (by NYers, fine, but by others who decide to latch on to the few ridiculous things that get magnified by the gossip blogs and message boards? Well, that’s sort of annoying), but whatever. Sure, some things about the neighborhood bugs, but what neighborhood doesn’t? NY Mag declared Park Slope the #1 neighborhood last year which probably hit the nail on the coffin as far as the neighborhood slinging goes, but perfect or not, it’s actually perfect for us and that’s the only thing that matters anyway.

As a New Yorker, I’ve lived in 3 boroughs. I grew up in Queens and spent most of my late teens, 20s, college and grad school years living in downtown Manhattan aside from the 5 years I lived in the NW. Now I call Brooklyn home, but when I was growing up in Queens, we never thought about Brooklyn at all. I don’t recall even ever going there, not even once. It just wasn’t on our radar except that it was where one of the top 3 competitive science and math high schools was located, but it was always last on everyone’s list (#1 was Stuyvesant in downtown Manhattan where my brother went, #2 Bronx Science, and #3 was always Brooklyn Tech). When you’re a kid growing up in Queens, Manhattan was the place where you planned to escape to when you turned 18 and that’s I did. It wasn’t that I didn’t like growing up where I did (I actually loved high school), but I knew that I didn’t need to go back. So when Mark and I were looking for a bigger place in 2000 than our tiny East Village apartment that we lived in for 4 years, we knew that we would be headed to Brooklyn.

But I don’t think that I ever told you that I’ve lived in this neighborhood before. Yes, 20 years ago during my 3rd and last year of art school. I have no idea what prompted me and 2 friends to leave the East Village and move to Brooklyn. Maybe it’s because it was the East Village and it got to be too much after awhile. I’ve written a little bit about my life there before, and at some point I think I got tired of having my studio apartment on St. Marks and Ave A be the gathering point and drop in place for every squatter, hippie and vegan anarchist punk I knew. So after scouting around a few apartments in Brooklyn neighborhoods I knew nothing about (My parents thought I was crazy in the sense that if I was leaving the city, they thought I should just move back to Queens), we settled on a ground floor, floor-through apartment in a wood frame house in the South Slope. It wasn’t one of those pretty, iconic brownstones that you see in photos here, but the house was built around the turn of the century and had plenty of the same pre-war details that you see in the fancier brownstones 12 blocks north in the landmark preservation zones.

This was 1990. Park Slope back then was really nothing like it is now. I mean, a lot of the same stuff was around, but the gentrification of the neighborhood was only just beginning, but very very slowly, and that wouldn’t really blow up until the maybe 15 years later. The avenues where our home is near now were off limits to us back then. Much like we wouldn’t walk past Avenue C and D in the East Village, we never walked below 7th or 6th Avenue in the Slope. Nothing probably would have happened to us or anything, but you know, it’s not something that you did and even we, who knew nothing about Brooklyn, knew that.

Our time in Brooklyn was definitely quieter than our former East Village life, though that commute trip back home from the city on the F train to the 15th street stop in the Slope, particularly late at night, was all kinds of long. The middle school kids on our block used to throw rocks at us too whenever we turned the corner from 7th Avenue towards home. They liked to taunt us particularly when we hauled loads of laundry from the laundromat. The friends who mattered to us still made the trip out to visit us so I guess the move worked in cutting out the riffraff from our lives. We still always had a lot of people in the house though. I can still remember our landlord, who lived above us, and I wonder if he still lives in that frame house on 16th Street. Now that I’m older and a homeowner and all that adult stuff, I can appreciate how patient, and I mean REALLY patient, he was with us considering we had people staying with us all the time and late night music jams into the night several times a week. Geez. Maybe he saw his younger self in us and that’s why he didn’t complain, although I’m sure we gave him plenty of things to complain about. All I remember is that when we told him we were leaving the apartment 1 year later, he just smiled this funny smile and said nothing.

The things I remember most about my year in Park Slope was spending a lot of time in Prospect Park which was 2 blocks away, our obsession with the Eggplant and Broccoli in Garlic dish at this one Chinese joint on 7th ave, selling handmade jewelry at the same Flea Market that’s in the school yard on weekends where Mia goes to school now, and our late night craving runs driving up and down 7th Ave in a friend’s car, stopping at every deli and bodega until we were able to hunt down Tofutti cartons. I also remember the long hike up and down 7th going to and from the Food Coop from our place on 16th street. Yup, the misunderstood Food Coop, one of the oldest and biggest in the country, which is the brunt of so many jokes (though some of it is well deserved). It’s the only time I’ve been a member, though Mark and I go back and forth about joining all the time. Back when I joined the coop shifts were 4 hours long (4 HOURS!! As opposed to the 2.5 hrs it is today) and your shift always felt like it came much sooner than the 4 weeks in between shifts. This was before the expansion and before the coop got all big. Back then, it was pretty much 1 room and the produce was still kept in cardboard boxes that it was shipped in. It wasn’t fancy, but it was dirt cheap and being vegan college students back then, joining the Coop was a no brainer. Plus there were always interesting characters working at the Coop, just like I imagine there is now. We made friends with a very cool and precocious 12 year old kid who worked a shift at the Coop cutting cheese into small cubes. He was raised by a single mother in the neighborhood who was a practicing Wiccan and they had a cat named Hecate. It sounds totally weird, but we hung out with him a lot and he was a really cool kid. I guess being a single mother, she was ok with us stealing him away for picnics in the park and vegan dinners at our house.

When I moved to Brooklyn a second time in 2000 after I graduated from grad school, Mark and I moved to a block and house not too different from that house on 16th street that I left 10 years before. I was back living in the South Slope, but this time, below the avenues that we would never walk past in those days. Unlike some of the blocks further north that were really starting to show the signs of gentrification, our old block was still pretty old school in 2000. There were these 2 elderly sisters across the street from us who brought out their lawn chairs and sat in their front yard in their house dresses with their dogs every evening of the year without fail except in extreme cold weather. Neighbors treated alternate side of the street parking like a sport, waiting in their cars a full 20 minutes before it was time to move the cars back, and when it was time, it was a mad race for a parking spot. Our old block was also home to 2 families who may have been the only openly public republican families in the heavily predominant liberal neighborhood. They posted their republican candidate signs at every election. Many of these people on that block had been living there for 15 or more years, including our landlords who we became close with. They had 2 girls and we lived on the top floor of their brick townhouse. We had our privacy even though it was pretty close quarters, but it was comforting to know that a family lived downstairs from us. This was Mia’s first home and even though we vowed that we would keep in touch with them when we moved a mere 8 blocks away 5 years later, we only saw them once out in the neighborhood.

It’s pretty interesting to live in a place long enough to see a neighborhood evolve, for better or worse. The playground across the street from us where the girls often play was still sketchy even when we first moved to the neighborhood 11 years ago and I made sure to cross the street and walk on the opposite side whenever I had to walk by those few blocks. Most of the restaurants and shops that line 5th ave today didn’t exist back then. We’ve seen them come (and go). I used to dismiss the notion that I might somehow be part of the movement of people who moved here, gentrified the place up and priced out all the old timers, the Hispanic population in the South Slope, artists and writers. I used to think, “No no! I’m not a lawyer! I don’t make Wall Street salaries!”; “But we moved here pre-2005 when 5th Ave was still kind of sketch and we didn’t live in “fancy” Park Slope proper. Hell, even though we own we *still* don’t live in the fancy part of town up by the Park in a 2 million dollar brownstone”; “I lived here in the 90s when NOBODY moved here. Doesn’t that make me an old timer?”. I don’t know if we are part of the gentrifying population or not, if we’re really yuppies or not (um, ergh), if it really matters in the end or not. What I see today is a really nice place to live, where neighbors really feel like neighbors, not just people you pass on the street without acknowledging, where the community really cares about its schools, where the kids can still play on sidewalks like we did when I was a kid. Brooklyn is our home. It will be for awhile.

I’m not a particularly crafty person for someone who designs and has to be creative for a living. Who knows…maybe that’s why. I sort of admire those moms who totally get their craft on and embark on huge art projects with their kids, but I’m not that mom. It kind of sucks for my kids since they’re all about the craft, but one thing I do like to do is cut out paper snowflakes every year. This year we made them out of the paper scraps that we use for our deluxe gift boxes. I’ve been saving these strips of paper without knowing what to do with them, but it’s perfect for snowflakes and this year’s batch might be my favorite yet. Mia totally got the hang of it this year and had the best idea to cut hearts into them (can you see them in the second to last snowflake above?). Oh, and yeah, I do realize that snowflakes have 6 points and mine have 8. But whatever.

So you know how you come across a song that you haven’t heard in awhile and it brings you back in time? It’s been happening to me a lot lately. I found an old Old Dinosaur Jr. CD that fell behind the stereo the other day. I hadn’t thought about them in years, but I put Green Mind in the CD player and I was back in 1991. I was staying at the brother of a friend’s house in Amherst Massachusetts and it was on heavy rotation. I think it might have even been a tape (yes kids, tape, as in cassette player). It was Spring, maybe April, and the weather was nice. This is what I associate Green Mind with – blue skies in Amherst. Other than that, I don’t remember why or what I did in Amherst or how I got there. The only thing I really remember is hitchhiking back to New York with that friend, listening to that tape. We caught a ride with a guy who drove a red sports car and he dropped us off in the Bronx on the very last subway stop on the 2 line. We took the subway all the way down to Brooklyn.

A song that I had totally forgotten about came on Pandora the other day and I had to just stop what I was doing and listen. So “Muzzle” by the Smashing Pumpkins doesn’t illicit a specific memory, but something about that song just reminds me of being young in that youth anthem sort of way. The Pumpkins were HUGE in the 90s, do you remember? I was living in Portland when that album came out, but thinking about the band took me back to 1991 again when I wore down their first album, Gish, on my Walkman because I played the tape so much. I was staying in Ohio for a few months before I moved to Washington and it just reminds me of that time and specifically, for whatever reason, the maroon carpet in the University common lounge room in the town I was staying in. Funny how you associate random things to music. The Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty will always remind me of soldering in the physical computing lab up on the 4th floor of the Tisch Building where I went to grad school at NYU.

And so…this is the music that’s been keeping me going these days. Lately it’s been all about 90s rock. It’s been comforting and familiar.

Speaking of the Smashing Pumpkins, do you know who’s still awesome? James Iha, that’s who. I think he was the first Asian American rock star to come on the mainstream radar. I mean there still aren’t a lot of them – a bunch of hapas out there (Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is half Korean) – but not back in the early 90s, no. And he’s back in A Perfect Circle who reunited, yay! Although I swear every band has reunited and is on tour. Sadly, it seems like the only way to make money as a musician these days. What are you guys listening to?

You think I’m joking, but it’s really true. My parents were competitive bowlers in the 70s and I spent a lot of time in bowling alleys here in the city. We had a whole bookshelf in our house dedicated to the many bowling trophies they would bring home and our closets were always filled with bowling bags and balls (’cause you gots to have your own ball, yo, if you’re serious bowler!). I was pretty little from what I could remember because the competitive years were really before my brother arrived, but I do remember our weekly trips being a good time. It was the sort of thing where if you saw a 4 year old at a dark, dingy, smoke filled bowling alley at 9pm eating greasy fries, you’d totally judge and think the parents were awful, but this was the 70s and nobody cared about rules and bedtimes and rigid schedules. So it was all cool. Besides, I distinctly remember other kids running around the bowling alley during competitions and practice leagues, and run around we did. I don’t think we were even supervised because our parents were too busy bowling. We stood on boxes and played a lot of pinball. We ate a lot of aforementioned greasy french fries, rectangular pieces of pizza and ice cream. We spent quarters at the gumball machines. We ran around in kid gangs up and down the aisles behind the lanes (ok, I don’t know if the last bit was actually true, but I know that I ran up and own those aisles).

Occasionally, I would sit with my parents at their lane and watch them bowl. I liked the way the balls magically emerged from the dark hole of the ball return. I liked putting my hand above the air vent, the ones you used right before you picked up a ball so your hands weren’t sweaty, and feeling the cool air under the palms of my hands. But most of all I liked the balls. The saturated jewel colors, the marbleized swirls that looked like dishwashing liquid, running my hand across a row of smooth, cold bowling balls all nestled together on a shelf, trying to catch my fingers in the 3 finger holes.

I don’t remember when the bowling slowed down. Maybe it was around the time my mom had my brother when I was 6. My dad eventually took up golf and the bowling trophies gradually got replaced by golf trophies and the trips to the bowling alley stopped altogether. Except for a single bowling pin which I believe still remains somewhere at my parent’s house, the bowling trophies slowly disappeared from the shelves. But it remains a fond early childhood memory for me. I can only think of good times when I remember climbing on the bottom ledge of the shoe counter on my tippy toes to get a better look at the row of shoes. The flicker of scoring screens, the brightly colored bucket seats, and the sounds of bowling pins being knocked together are ingrained memories. So it’s ironic that I have never, ever bowled a single ball, let alone play a single game of bowling in my life.

I can’t remember the last time I stepped inside a bowling alley – it might have been in grad school – but the girls and I went to a bowling birthday party over the weekend. Aside from the glow in the dark lanes and pins that made everything look like it was on acid, the bowling alley felt the same. Mia bowled a strike on her first try ever, which immediately made me think that bowling was in the genes (it must have skipped over me, but my brother was on the bowling team in high school). I think it was just beginners luck, but, the girl was really into it. Long after most of the kids lost interest in bowling 2 hours later, she was filling in for people, all hyped up on birthday cake. Claudine seemed to like it too and I wondered why we had never done this before.

Bowling still seems like a throwback to the 70s, even though I know it’s really not, not like roller rinks, another fond childhood memory of mine. We’re definitely going to go bowling again, but I’ll make sure to sit in the sidelines. I helped Claudine carry an 8 pound ball over to the lane a few times and I ended up with a sore back and mild sciatic pain (see? I really can’t carry more than 5 pounds! Those bulging discs are ready to slip, yikes!). I guess this is why I never bowled.

Related (because this post about the 70s is AWESOME): Speaking of the 70s…

On all our trips back to Washington, we always make sure to stop by our old college campus. I’m not sure why we make the visit every time, after all, I don’t find myself going up to the 4th floor of the NYU Tisch Building or visiting the Cooper Union foundation building (although I am completely and utterly in love with the new academic building and wish so bad to see what it’s like inside).

I’ve talked often of my Cooper years and a lot about my Northwest years, but not so much about what I actually did at Evergreen. Coming from a school as traditional as Cooper, where reputation, legacy and excellence was pounded into your head as soon as you entered classes on your first day of freshmen year, Evergreen was like a being able to breathe again. You had the freedom to play, to experiment and be creative and silly without the fear and pressure of failing. And if you did fail, you had the support of teachers and classmates around you. It was exactly what I needed after 3 years at Cooper where everything was just so serious and competitive. I didn’t go into Evergreen thinking I was going to write music, but that’s what Mark and I did at school. Orchestrated arrangements influenced by jazz and twelve-tone serialism (him) and abstract time signature and sometime no time signature pieces (me). I used to reserve practice time in one of the 4 piano practice rooms 5 times a week in 3 hour chunk blocks. I didn’t always play though. Sometimes I curled up underneath the baby grand and took naps, especially if I had writer’s block.

I remember I once made a fellow classmate tear up after playing a composition on the piano in class (super awesome, I never made anyone cry with my artwork before!). It was a weekly critique class where we were performing works in progress. While my parents struggled to understand why I left Cooper (free tuition! World classs reputation!) to go to a relatively unknown school (not free tuition! No one from the East Coast has ever heard of it!), I knew from the first week of classes that this was the right place for me to feel creative again. Despite having aspirations to be an artist for most of my childhood, I never did have any passion for it once I left high school. I sucked as an artist. As a result, my art had no real soul or emotional content. I can say this because I feel it to be true. I did find it, however, in music. There were no expectations, no pressures, no baggage. Being up on stage playing something that I wrote was terrifying, but there was never anything to prove, to anyone or myself.

I didn’t realize how lucky we were as music students at Evergreen until I later went to grad school at NYU and compared notes with other music and audio engineering students who came over from the NYU undergrad music department. For being a small, state school, we had the luxury of long blocks of (almost unlimited) studio time in all the recording studios, the electronic music studios, access to the best audio equipment, musical instruments and a state of the art black box theater for performances. Even as well equipped as it seemed back then, the school has even more impressive stuff now.

Our old teacher, Peter, gave us a tour of the new television studios and the old, familiar music rooms. Aside from being a total audio geek (that was his house the girls played drums at), Peter’s a total kid magnet and super goofy and fun. Even with all the new stuff, it’s nice to see that some things at Evergreen haven’t changed. It’s been about 16 years since I stepped inside the 16 track studio and it was just as I remembered it: the 2488 console, rolls of 2″ Ampex tape (analog, yes!). And then there is the buchla, one of Mark’s favorite toys while he was at school. It was fun to see Mia getting a little lesson from Peter, making little patches and messing around with the vintage analog synth. She was all over that thing while Claudine gravitated towards the drums as she always seems to do whenever there is a drum kit in the room. We watched her play and agreed that the kid has a knack for it. Seems as if the art genes have passed down to the kids, but maybe some of these music genes have passed on too.

I have no idea what they were doing here. Maybe practicing their Charlie’s Angels poses or something. Or maybe they were so excited to see where mommy and daddy met that they decided to do their butt dance.

…which has my heart.

Turning the corner towards the public access to the beach, with the first view of Haystack Rock, made my heart ache. Like I was waiting to feel this feeling all trip long.

It’s been a good 14 years since I’ve been back. Even before I made the Northwest my home I spent a few summer weeks on Cannon Beach with my then boyfriend’s family, who rented a house every year for the month of July. When I moved out west, I stayed with them again for a few weeks the next 2 summers. The Oregon Coast was a special place for them and when his parents finally retired, they made it their permanent home.

Walking the beach at dusk on that cloudy Saturday evening with the kids, I thought about that first summer here, 20 years ago. I remember the early morning walks, the fridge that was always full of berries and freshly washed lettuce, dried and stored in Tupperware containers, and I remember the spectacular sunsets. His parents were like family to me – we were close – and having had 5 boys of their own, I think they enjoyed having a girl around the house. Even after the boy and I split up after 3 years, I kept in touch with the parents through letters and holiday cards.

I haven’t been in touch with them in well over 12 years, but I thought about them hard that evening. The last I heard, the father had some health issues and they may have even taken an apartment in Portland to be closer to the hospital. Though I don’t know for sure, I had a strong sense that he wasn’t around anymore. It made me sad. It made me sadder still that I hadn’t kept in touch.

We may promise and have the best intentions to keep in touch with the people who are important in our lives, but sometimes it does not always work out to be. Sometimes, certain relationships run their course and in the end…you have to let go.

We’re boarding a plane and heading to Seattle, Olympia and Portland in less than a week. We are really excited about this because It’s been exactly 2 years since our last NW trip and 2 years since we’ve been on an airplane (oh, and what do you mean we have to pay for luggage now? what, what, what??).

You know I’m a New York City girl through and through, but lately I’ve been day dreaming about Seattle and getting all kinds of nostalgic. In a lot of ways, it’s like going back home – certainly for Mark since that’s where he’s from and where his family lives, but I think it’s partly because moving to the NW was such an important time in my life (see a few posts back). I’ve been waxing too nostalgic on here lately, but I have so little from my past in the way of photos and writings. What I do have are fading memories. I have this intense need to record them before I start to remember less and less. We’re closing in on 20 years since I moved out the the NW, but sometimes it feels so much closer than that. I want to remember what it felt like getting off that plane in Seattle, to live through the early to mid 90s, not in NYC as I had always thought I would, but in the NW so far from home. Bonus for you for these old photos I’m going to post. Some twitter friends and I were talking about posting our hair styles through the years. Can’t believe I’m gonna embarrass myself like this.

During the summer of ’91, I was traveling and overheard 2 girls talking about a school called the Evergreen State College in Washington. They were talking about moving there because of the music scene in Olympia and Seattle. A few months prior to that I had quit art school 3 weeks before finishing out my third year at the Cooper Union. Even though I wanted to leave a year before, I hung on because I was afraid of what my parents might do, but I had reached my breaking point. I had no intentions of going back to school, but 6 months later I was on a plane headed out west to a state I’d never been in and a school I knew nothing about except what I had overheard while listening in on someone’s conversation.

I’ll never forget that bus ride down the Evergreen Parkway in the dark headed towards campus. I couldn’t really see anything because there were only a few street lights so I felt like I was riding into an abyss of who knew what…which of course, it was in so many ways. No expectations, no plans, clean slate, excitement and butterflies. When I got out of the airport bus in front of my dorm, the air felt different. Everything was just so different. My first few days at school were spent by myself. Kids were still on winter break and classes didn’t start for a few days so I mostly walked around the empty campus and blew my own mind laying on the soccer field at night with so many stars, thinking about the fact that no one knew I was here.

January 1992, Olympia Washington. I had butt long hair I had been growing out from a pixie cut gone bad my freshman year of college. And yes, that’s a nose ring. Oh come on, you had one too, admit it. So did half of my classmates, and all the boys had long hair and played in bands. Welcome to 1992.

You might recall that Mark was the first person I saw on my first night in Olympia. I was on the hunt for a phone to call my parents (no cell phones back then, folks, no cell phones) and he worked at the college deli. I bought a sandwich from him which he claims he doesn’t remember. We ended up in the same music program a week later. The next day, I took my first bus ride into town to buy some food. I spotted a supermarket, got off and bought a bunch of bananas, a box of muffins and a carton of soy milk and hauled it back to my dorm. I kept these in my room even though I was assigned to live in a 4 bedroom apartment with a common kitchen and living space. None of my roommates had come back from winter break yet. For lunch on my first day I ate a banana and a muffin. For dinner, I ate the other banana and another muffin.

1993, Olympia, Washington. Mark was known as the “deli guy with long hair who played bass in bands” around campus. Because he worked such a “high profile” job, everyone knew him. When we show the girls pictures of Mark with long hair, they giggle and ask why Daddy’s hair is “broken”.

I probably don’t have to remind you what was going on with music back in ’91. Nine days after I arrived, Nirvana played Saturday Night Live on January 11, 1992 and I remember sitting in the auditorium for a lecture the next morning with the place buzzing off the hook. Nirvana used to play in the dorms at campus a lot and it was just blowing everyone’s minds around school that they were on live national TV. I was never a huge Nirvana fan, but I was into a lot of the other Seattle bands since the mid to late 80s (I had first read about Soundgarden in the Village Voice in 1984). I guess that’s where my curiosity about Seattle began. Mark was into the early SubPop stuff – Melvins, Mudhoney, the U-Men, though he did once own a Nirvana Demo tape as he was close friends with Kurt’s cousin which he subsequently LOST somewhere over the years (Mark! we coulda maybe been rich if you held on to that tape, Geezus.)

In the same way that I feel lucky to have lived in the East Village in the late 80s, it was a pretty cool time to be young and living in Olympia Washington back in those days what with all the music and Riot Grrrl stuff happening right there, but I was also there at school when it all started to end. I remember a classmate running into the recording studio while audio class was in session. He broke the news that Kurt had killed himself and we all just sat around for a long time, stunned. A month later we graduated and Mark and I moved down to Portland.

1995, Portland, Oregon. We always thought that this photo of our housemates would make the best band pic ever. That’s my friend and roommate Jason who came to Olympia around the same time I did from his years studying jazz guitar in NY the same years I was going to Cooper. I think the basis of our entire friendship was getting nostalgic about NY. We’d sit in his room and stare at an old subway poster and chat about those NY years. We didn’t know each other then, but we did conclude that we might have been at the same show once. He’s back in Portland playing music after a few years in Seattle and Northern California. Also, Mark and I got rid of the hair when we moved down to Portland and I dyed it black again with a box of hair dye I bought at the drug store, the first time it had been black since high school. Guys were cutting their hair short again and wearing black nerd glasses and those annoying keychain wallets. There was one scene in Portland and all the boys looked like this. And they all still played in bands.

1995, Portland, Oregon. I look pissed here. Like angry Riot Grrrl! Maybe I was pissed that it took 3 treatments to strip out all that black hair dye. The black dye wouldn’t die. Or maybe I’m just squinting from the sun because after 6 months of rainy misty winter, the sun came out that day.

1995, Portland, Oregon. I totally miss the front porch of our old house. It was a creaky old, 2 story Victorian 4 bedroom house. Our total rent was $950 split among 4 people. All the bedroom closets were huge and had windows. My roommate’s closet had a red staircase to nowhere. The house also had a dumbwaiter and a mysterious locked door on the middle landing of the staircase. We always wondered what was behind there. We swore the house was haunted. On stormy, windy days, the house sort of scared us and we often all slept in the living room.

My time in Portland was ok. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. I got a job that was repetitive and tedious, working in the graphics department of a local publication, but I did like the people that I worked with. A lot of the Portland years were spent cooking food in the house, going to see movies with beer at McMenamins, going to shows, taking trips to the Oregon Coast, and eating lots of sushi. Mark and I started eating fish again by then and we took a lot of household dinner outings with our roommates and ate a lot of sushi. We also spent a lot of time on that porch. I think one of my favorite memories of the Portland years was the 4 of us trekking down a few blocks in the snow (it doesn’t snow much in Portland) to get our first ever Christmas tree. We picked out the most Charlie Browniest tree ever. I think we had a string of lights but everything else we improvised. We strung popcorn and cranberries and maybe even hung guitar picks on the tree. We had an Elmo doll that sat on top.

1996, Seattle, Washington. Sometimes I wonder if I would have never left the Northwest if I moved to Seattle instead of Portland.

I’m not really sure why I decided to move down to Portland instead of Seattle after we graduated. It was random really and I had always thought I’d move up to Seattle. Most of our classmates moved there and started working in recording studios, but Seattle felt too big, too gray. Portland had much more of a small-town vibe, but I remember feeling really apprehensive and unsure the day I moved my stuff in a U-Haul to our new house on NE Hancock. I wondered if I had made the right decision. Ironically, after I had taken a trip back home to see my mom who was sick at the time, I decided only a month after I moved that I would go back to NY in 2 years. Maybe that’s why I feel like my whole time in Portland was transitional. Sometimes I’m amazed that I didn’t waver on that 2 year plan. I stuck to that date, sold most of our things, shipped a few boxes and threw everything else into the silver Toyota Camry that I was driving at the time. Just as I’ll never forget the day I stepped off that plane back in ’92, I’ll never forget the day we pulled out of there in September 1996 and drove back East. My roommates and I didn’t have a drawn out farewell and they weren’t home the morning we left. I don’t think any of us could have handled it. I knew that I wanted to move back home and the decision felt right at every turn as I was really homesick for NY at that point, but I was heartbroken. As we drove off, I looked back and watched the cats who had jumped up on the hood of a car watch after us until they got smaller and I couldn’t see them anymore

September 1996, somewhere in the Southwest Mt. Shasta, California. I look like shit here because I felt like shit. Puffy eyes and messy hair. I cried driving through 5 states, including the total length of California. I was so sad. I’m trying to put up a brave front for this pic.

I think it’s totally weird that even though I never lived there, Seattle is the place I think about when I feel nostalgic for the Northwest. We were there often enough, but perhaps it’s because of the fact that I never lived there, I still romanticise it in the way I used to before I moved to that part of the country. Maybe it represents not the reality of daily life, which I experienced in Portland and Olympia, but the ideologies of youth and the possibilities of new beginnings. I’m so looking forward to going back.