So familiar

This morning, I took the kids to the Asian market nearby to buy some produce.  Each time I go there, I think of my mother.

 

She used to take me to Asian markets when I was a little girl.  And I seem to remember being the only child of the six there for many of the trips.  So in that sense, my experience today didn't seem very familiar.  I was there with two kids in the car cart and one child strapped to me.  

 

The smells are exactly the same: fishy.  It smells horrible.  I could never go there if I was pregnant.  But even the smells make me smile.  My kids held their noses.  I certainly did the same when I was little.

 

My shopping trip with my mom usually ended with a treat like Chocolate Yan Yan or Pocky sticks.  Chocolate Yan Yan was my favorite.  But now that I know what hydrogenated oils are, my kids don't get those.  Sometimes ignorance is bliss, you know?  My poor, deprived children. (Okay, sometimes they get lollipops.  High fructose corn syrup is far less criminal in my opinion.)

I do remember feeling like my mother and I blended in with everyone else there.  We were all Asian.  And when I go to the market now, I still feel like I blend in, even though the Asian in me and my children has been watered down a little (with some wonderfully sweet water).  Sometimes, I want to tell the clerk, "I'm Chinese, you know," just to make sure she knows that I belong there.

 

Mom was a busy working woman, which make her efforts to spend some one-on-one time with her fourth child even more impressive.  Of course, I couldn't fully appreciate the planning and intention of that mother-daughter time until I became a mother of a few children myself.

 

 I was probably seven years old when I wrote and illustrated a little book about going shopping with my mom at "AI HOA."  Clearly it meant something to me.  Clearly she loved me.  And clearly, those hydrogenated oils did some good.