Today’s soundtrack: internal combustion power
Today at 11:32pm: Showing Shady’s cousins from Hong Kong how to play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City


This week I visited my grandmother, the Columbia exploded and it was Chinese New Year’s.

My grandmother has many children but no one goes to visit her anymore. I was a freshman in high school when the Challenger exploded and I didn’t think I’d hear a similar newscast in my lifetime. For Chinese New Year’s I went to Ping’s Seafood with a grip of Asian friends. We had to stand on line behind a crowd of white people, we waited 50 minutes. I don’t think that’s right.

The chow was killer though. Eggtart’s a Hong Kongite so she knows what to order.

I asked my grandmother to tell me stories, anything and everything about The Old Days. Though nearly a century old, she’s still lucid and a lot of it is fascinating to me. Unlike the neatly-packaged, self-sufficient stories of television and film, a story from an old person has no clear-cut beginning, end or conveniently discernible morals.


There wasn’t much candy in Korea, we didn’t really have that. Maybe one type. But during the Japanese occupation I was a little girl and some Japanese merchants came. They opened up a candy store.

The family who ran the candy store, they had an old woman behind the counter. Her teeth were black, dark black, like ink. I always thought that was strange. She was kind of scary.

Later the family told me that in the area of Japan they were from, the old custom was that when a woman’s husband died and she didn’t want to remarry, she painted her teeth black. She loved her husband very much and after he died she painted her teeth black.