“I don’t like to travel. I hate being on the plane for a long time because the sound of the engine is annoying and I can’t fall asleep.”

This is the response I get from my dad every time I ask him to go to Hong Kong with me. I’ve asked him hundreds of times: when he was in a bad mood, a good mood and now, mainly an annoyed mood after I surpassed the tenth time asking him. 

I don’t remember when my obsession with Chinese-related things started, but every single trip I go on, the first thing I check for is if the city has a Chinatown. I collect grocery bags from different Chinese supermarkets. I prefer the dim sum restaurants where servers push carts and ask what you want instead of the ones where you order from a menu, because that’s what the dim sum restaurants in Hong Kong are like. Part of me feels like I am trying to compensate for a lack of Chinese culture in my life.

My mom is Indonesian, and she immigrated to the U.S. to attend graduate school. She speaks Indonesian frequently, and there’s always Indonesian food in the fridge and Indo-mie in the pantry. It’s clear she loves her culture.

My dad, on the other hand, immigrated to the U.S. when he was in elementary school, so even though he speaks conversational Cantonese, he is much more Americanized. He doesn’t love Chinese food, saying the food was better in Hong Kong. When I ask him about his childhood before he moved to America, he talks about the dirty streets and polluted air. 

Even though my dad says he is culturally more American than Chinese, the way he was raised has undoubtably caused certain aspects of Chinese culture to be ingrained in him. When I was younger, I didn’t understand these cultural differences, so I took his lack of physical affection and verbal praise as him being harsh and cold. These misunderstandings caused my relationship with my dad to be very tumultuous during my early teenage years. As I grew older, I began to understand his version of love a little more, once I realized how his idea of it was shaped by the love he received during his own childhood. After I came to this realization, I wanted to understand Chinese culture even more.

I think there is an inevitable loss of cultural heritage in the generations following immigration. My grandma knew how to cook traditional Chinese food, but no recipes were passed down from her. When my grandpa passed in 2022, my sole connection to a rich Chinese culture was severed. Since his passing, I haven’t heard my dad speak Cantonese. It’s been so long that I wonder if he’s forgotten some of it. 

I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know I could write out my last name with Chinese characters until a couple years ago. Last month, I learned that Peking duck was pronounced “peeking,” not “pecking,” which was how I had been saying it for years. I went to a Chinese Sunday school for four years, but can’t recall anything.

I yearn for a stronger connection to my Chinese heritage, but don’t know where to start. 

Sometimes, it makes me sad that I will never get to know all of the little beliefs and sayings from my grandma, that some of it will be lost as time goes on. But, I relish in the small snippets of my Chinese heritage that I can get, through Lunar New Year festivals and rare stories about Hong Kong from my dad.

Every Lunar New Year, the four of us have a family dinner. There’s always steamed fish as it is customary to eat fish on Lunar New Year, but the rest of the dinner is a chaotic amalgamation of microwavable dumplings, chicken wings from Costco and Indo-mie. Besides the dinner, the day is like any other ordinary day.

However, recently there have been more Lunar New Year festivals around the area, and it’s become so enjoyable to attend as many as I can. The second I step into the festival, I hear the excited chatter of languages from English, to Mandarin, to Vietnamese. There is red everywhere I look–from the lanterns hanging from the tents to the decorative ribbons that line the performance stage. The festivalgoers and performers are alight with enthusiasm, and it’s so beautiful to see so many people passionate about sharing their culture with others.

I’m not sure if my dad will ever agree to go to Hong Kong with me or not, so for now, I pose in front of the Hong Kong Market beside my dad, imagining that we’re overseas, 8,000 miles away.