Thanksgiving…The Sequel

The Thanksgiving crew re-gather on day two, with theme and variation. One family is gone, and another substituted. Another college student joins. The East-West balance shifts firmly East, and dinner is pure Chinese except for a random store-bought apple pie.

We pick up Grandmother Y with her teen grands on our way while the Driver and Tech take our teaching assistant and pick up their former student, now in college nearby. By the time we all arrive in Ann Arbor, the two college girls who never met before, are chatting cheerfully in their provincial dialect, Mandarin left behind in the joy of the sound of home. They look like tiny sisters and slide into the age gap between the ABC teens and the East and West adults.

The evening unrolls with comfort. Massive food preparation is still underway on our arrival and we chat to the increasing aroma of Sichuan straight up and spicy. “I was going to go mild,” murmurs the cook, “But you all said you LIKE spicy.” “Definitely,” we chorus. “There’s a few mild dishes too, just in case,” she adds.

The teens of today were the roaring toddlers of a decade plus ago, dashing around my house with abandon. It is wonderful to see them matured, interacting with the wide range of adults, switching easily from English to Chinese, comfortable with both cultures, deferent to their elders but pure American none the less. The current noisy children are our four grands, equally comfortable with the mix of language and food choices. The oldest grandmother speaks no English but mixes well with everyone, loving the little blondes like they were her own. She knows the word “baby.”

This interplay of families has deep roots. The 40-something host couple met us over a decade ago when they were struggling to take root in this country. As we befriended them in that transition, our kids came to know and enjoy them. We met their parents as they visited, and now twice have been to their town in central China to visit. Last summer, it was our young teaching assistant who put us on the right bus to visit the old folks. Today she is in the home of the second and third generation. The extra grandmother too is an old friend despite our language barrier. Last fall we helped her bury her husband.

The evening ends with a sweet fruit soup. I work with the grandmother and the teaching assistant to create tiny balls of rice dough that will go into the soup. Glutinous rice, sticky rice. As the three of us work together, three generations loosely bound by friendship, the conversation wanders in and out of languages. Everyone gathers in the kitchen again to enjoy the soup, sucking the rice balls off our spoons.

Suddenly the cook remembers the pie. Everyone over 18 opts out and the pie goes to the teens, children of China who now have American taste buds. But the youngest leans over to me and whispers, “YOU bake a lot better apple pie than these ones my grandma buys at the store…”