Ingrid Ellis’s Reviews > Real Americans > Status Update

Whenever Betty needed something, her granddaughter seemed inconvenienced, acted as though Betty were interrupting her very important life. Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another's lives-that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

The "news" was often not news at all but sayings from Mao. If it was music, we were to break into a rehearsed, identical dance. "No matter how close our parents are to us, they are not as close as our relationship with Mao," went one song.

“To the children I went to school with, these efforts didn’t matter. Even if I ate the same bologna-and-white-bread sandwiches the other kids did and spoke perfect English, I had a face that marked me as different.”

“My mother and father had spoken English in the house, never Chinese. Every Christmas Eve, a plate of chocolate chip cookies materialized on our mantel, with a glass of milk that neither of my parents could drink, because they were lactose intolerant. They must have poured Santa’s milk down the drain. It was as though they followed a guidebook on how to be American. (cont.)