Ganbei Fall 2020 Nostalgia

CHAPTER 3
This is a picture of me at age 5
taken by my dad on a digital camera.
Though it’s a simple candid capture,
it brings all of my sense of identity
together in one picture; I’m shown,
gums out, with a McDonalds pancake
in my cheeks and hand that my
parents and grandparents picked
up on a quiet Sunday morning for
the breakfast discount in suburban
New Jersey along the highway.
My dad is hunched behind the
kitchen table across from me poised
with our advanced, brand new Canon
A260 struggling to focus on me midbite
after spontaneously becoming
an aspiring photographer. At the
same time the Chinese newspaper
my grandma scrambled for every
Sunday grocery run at Hmart, our
only Asian grocery around town in
2005, and a crop of my grandfather’s
immortal New York City bamboo
surround me as representative
pieces of my Chinese background.
All of the little parts of my life fed
into who I see myself as between two
cultures; as small as a syrupy Sunday
drive-thru to my grandparents’
greatest everyday treasures. ■
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