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Tuesday, 24 November 2009

Friday, 20 November 2009

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

  • Amazing

    I always say that my mother is the strongest woman I know....because it's true! I was talking to my sister Joyce earlier today, and she told me some information about my parents, particularly my mother, when we were younger living in Boston.  Most of the information I've written in this entry is actually new to me.  I only learned about all this today.  I don't know why it's taken me this long to ask these questions to my mother.  I do know that my parents' experiences have shaped who I am today.   

    When my parents came to the US in the late 1970s, they had very little.  They lived in Chinatown, and my father worked in a Chinese restaurant. Carol was born in 1976 and Joyce in 1978.  Around that time, my mom took a sewing job...in our apartment.  Apparently, it was some underground thing.  Her friends took her to a sewing shop, and my mother bought an industrial-looking sewing machine for $300! She spent her own money, and back then, that's a lot of money! A guy came by, dropped off some fabric, and she made some clothes. Then, the guy came back and picked them up.  My mother    made about $100-$200 per month.  It wasn't a lot of money, but when asked why she had the job, she replied that she wanted to stay home with the kids.  She only had the job for a year before she realized it was too much to do the job and take care of the kids at the same time.  For the next five years, my mom was out of a job, Ken and I were born, and we moved to a new apartment in the South End.  Both the apartments in Chinatown and the South End were subsidized housing.  Rent only cost my parents $300 per month.  Because my father was the only one working in a job making a salary of $1600 per month, my parents needed ways to support the family.  Here is where I learned how resourceful my mother was. 

    When my mom had Carol, the hospital referred my mother to WIC. She received nutrition education and vouchers for food. She still remembers something she learned in those classes, "When the baby is three months old, you should mix a little egg yolk with milk and feed it to the baby." Hehe. Is that true? Anyway, the vouchers for the food is how I ended up liking government cheese.  I'm serious. It was good. When we were living in Chinatown, my mother used to go to the South Cove Community Health Center.  There is where she learned about Head Start and enrolled us into the program.  I remember when I was in the Head Start program, I met this teacher named Nancy. She was an older Chinese woman who I became close to.  She ended up naming her own child after me, and I still bump into her from time to time in Chinatown.  Then when we moved to the new apartment, my mother took us to the South End Community Health Center.   She was passing by this info board when a picture of a Santa Claus caught her eye. The flier was advertising for a program called Globe Santa. It's a program created by Boston Globe, and it provides gifts to children in Boston.  The Globe Santa Fund collects donations from readers and advertisers so that children from these Boston communities can have gifts on Christmas. I asked my mother if the flier was in Chinese, and she immediately got a bit defensive.  In Chinese, she says to me, "No! Your mom is smart. She was learning English."  I was completely shocked, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised by my mother. So every Christmas morning, we ran down the stairs, opened our front door, and a big brown box waited on our doorstep. I remember a lot of books, and Joyce remembered the generic Barbies. HAH! There were a lot of other educational toys in there too, but that was our Christmas morning. 

    I know I just went into a whole shpeel about the resources my mother got for us, but starting in 1984, my parents opened up their own Chinese restaurant with help from my uncle who was a businessman in Hong Kong.  So they were not only resourceful enough to get all these supports that I mentioned, but they worked LONG hours at the restaurant, and still had time to make sure we were fed and clothed.  I remember there were nights when my parents didn't have our neighbors to watch over us. I would hang out at the restaurant, and when it got late, I slept in our station wagon in the parking lot located in the back of the restaurant. Eventually, we all ended up working in the restaurant as we got older. I started taking food orders and packing food in the 6th grade, but by this time, my parents had saved enough money to move us out of Boston and into an actual home in the suburbs. They knew they had to get us out of Boston Public Schools if they wanted us to have a good education.  I could go on, but it's amazing what my parents were able to do for us. I don't like to brag, but look at my family! We all graduated from college. We all have decent jobs.  Carol is actually going for her Ph.D. right now. Carol is actually the first one to graduate from high school and college in our family. It's amazing how we've all turned out. Growing up, my mother would say to me, "We work this hard so that some day you won't have to work as hard as we do."  When Joyce told me about my mother taking the sewing job because she wanted to stay home with the kids, I started crying. Just thinking about the amount of hardships they experienced overwhelms me. Today, I can't imagine them suffering this way. But, do you know the greatest thing about reflecting back about this is? I actually have the ability take care of them now.

Friday, 23 October 2009

  • Swooning over Edward Cullen

    Anyone else excited about New Moon coming out next month? I have to admit when the movie Twilight came out, I thought, "Oh, great! A movie about teenage vampires."  It honestly did not look appealing to me at all.  However, this past spring when I went on the freshman trip to DC, I got to see Twilight for the first time when the students put it on during our drive down.  Let's just say that...I fell in love with the movie.  Who knew that flying hottie vampires would be so romantic? After I watched it, a couple of teachers told me that the book is even better. I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into the series, but this past weekend, I started reading the book Twilight and couldn't put it down. I LOVED it and finished it after 3 days.  I loved it so much that after I finished it, I immediately bought the other 3 books in the series.  They should arrive at my doorstep tomorrow, and I can't wait to get started on New Moon.  I think watching the movie first made the book even better.  As I was reading I could actually picture Edward and Bella! I was literally swooning whenever he said something sweet or romantic to her. It's kind of fun to be excited about a book series, especially this one.
    I feel like I'm 16. HAH!

Wednesday, 21 October 2009

  • Birthday Parties and Chemical Burns

    This past Sunday, I got to help out with two birthday parties - one for a 3-year old and another for a 5-year old.  I shadowed and helped out at the first one, and then the coordinator supervised me for the second one.  It was pretty easy. It was a lot of fun actually except for the downpour that happened all day. Good thing the birthdays weren't a bust, and all their guests attended.  The kids were cute too.  I even got a $20 tip which was really unexpected, but I gladly took it. I'm looking forward to the next time I help out.  It turns out that after training, I can just be at the site by myself - setting up, making sure the clients are taken care of, and clean up.  Unfortunately, all the extra stuff - booking, talking to clients, ordering and purchasing items, etc all happen during the weekdays when I'm not available.  Because of that, I've decided to apply for another event planning internship I found recently that could give me more hours on the weekends. So I'll see how that works out.

    Before you read this, just know that when you get down towards the end of this blog entry, it's going to be gross.  So, prepare yourself:

    I sprained my left ankle about two weeks ago when I was practicing for a lion dance performance. We had about an hour or so before we went on, so my partner and I did a run through of the performance. We don't normally practice on carpet, but we had to that moment.  I was wearing my lion paws. I believe when I came down from a jump, my paw caught on the rug, and my ankle went in a direction that shouldn't have. It was painful when it first happened, but I could still walk on it. I just felt soreness.  I walked around and even did a few jumps. My teammates encouraged me to keep it iced, wrapped, and elevated before we went on. I got worried since after my break, my ankle didn't feel strong, but still, I forged forward and did the performance. I didn't feel the actual pain during the performance until I had to do a roll in the lion.  You see, when you do the roll, you go down on your left leg/foot first (where my sprain was located). So I basically landed on the sprain probably making it worse. Good thing the roll happened at the end of the routine or I wouldn't have been able to continue the performance.  I went to the doctor the next day and found out that I had micro tears in my ankle.  I was on crutches for a day and then wore a brace.  It seemed like it was healing especially since I was walking around with no problems! This past Friday, my mother decided to play Dr. Wan.  She knew my ankle wasn't feeling 100% yet so she decided to use this Chinese medicine called Zheng Gu Shui.  It's supposed to reach into the bone and make it stronger.  She put it on before I went to bed, so she covered it with gauze and and an ace bandage so it wouldn't get all over the bed.  That night, I felt a stinging or burning sensation on my ankle, but my mother said that was a good sign because the pain was coming out (hah!). The next morning when my mother took off the bandage, my skin had turned to a dark brown and even black color. Over the course of the day, the section where she applied the medicine became a HUGE blister.  It was gross. It really looked alien to me.  It eventually popped and the dead skin fell off.  It became hard to walk on it because of how painful it was. My whole foot was swollen too.  My parents didn't know what happened since they've used the medicine before with positive results.  The only difference was that they never covered the medicine up like they did with my ankle.  Roger wanted to know more about this Zheng Gu Shui. On the medicine box, it states "Don't cover tightly".  However, after some research online, you're not supposed to cover it at all or it can result in.... a chemical burn. I went to the doctor the next day, and she told me that I had a 2nd degree chemical burn on my ankle. She gave me some bactrim as a precaution just in case it gets infected and suggested that I take a few days off from work. Thinking back, I realize that the stinging/burning sensation I was feeling the night the medicine was on my ankle was the actual burning of my skin. It's quite painful, but I've taken two days off from work.  Swelling has gone down, and I'm feeling much better.  I should be able to go to school tomorrow.  I could probably sue Zheng Gu Shui.

MoChoJo

  • Visit MoChoJo's Xanga Site
    • Name: Joanne
    • State: Massachusetts
    • Metro: Boston
    • Gender: Female
    • Member Since: 7/21/2002
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