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Yuxi Lin | payoffsong.com | June 2022 | 12 minutes (3,311 words)
The year was 2004, my inaugural year in America, a land where even the concept of ‘wholesale’ felt foreign yet fascinating. I, a mere twelve years old, typed this word into my digital translator, seeking not just a definition but perhaps a sense of belonging, a feeling of being whole – a sentiment as resonant as a love song.
noun
definition: the selling of goods in large quantities to be retailed by others.
To be whole and wholesome, that was my silent love song, my inner melody. The allure of abundance, of being able to acquire, was deeply appealing. Before me, the glass display case shimmered, a treasure chest of luxury I had only dreamed of. Watches, earrings, necklaces – each piece a silent promise under the smudges of countless hands. At that point, the pinnacle of extravagance in my young mind was a Costco diamond. During ESL class, when my teacher inquired about my ideal proposal, I envisioned a Costco aisle, the salesperson unlocking the case to reveal the $1999 ring. The proposal would culminate at a nearby Pizza Hut, my culinary haven, where my future husband would kneel on the faux-wood tiles, a scene as romantic, in my naive heart, as any love song.
While my parents navigated the towering shelves, their friends in tow, I gravitated towards the sample stations, small islands of American cuisine in a sea of unfamiliarity. American restaurants were uncharted territory for my parents, a blend of apprehension and cultural distance keeping us away. For a brief period at school, I tried to discard my mother’s lovingly prepared fried rice, succumbing to the taunts of white classmates, but my meager allowance for chicken nuggets quickly ran dry.
The sample stands, manned by kind-faced ladies in hairnets, became my haven. They offered glimpses of Hot Pockets, solitary nachos with salsa – but my heart yearned for the microwavable, cheese-filled pierogies. “Trash food,” my mother would declare with disdain. Yet, in my secret heart, I aspired to be a trash can, a receptacle for all things American, even the discarded, the ‘trashy.’
Often, these precious samples arrived in grease-stained cupcake liners. I would meticulously fold them, halves then quarters, concealing them in my palm, waiting a respectful interval before returning for another taste. I was acutely aware of not appearing too eager, too needy – a sensation perhaps familiar to many immigrants, a hunger for something intangible, regardless of years spent in their adopted land. Despite my careful attempts at restraint, I often returned for thirds, even fourths, unable to resist. The aproned ladies sometimes cast knowing glances, but their silence was a kindness I still cherish.
Costco held a unique satisfaction for my parents, a contentment I rarely witnessed outside of our trips back to China. Their coworker occasionally joined these pilgrimages, stocking up on 15-pound sacks of flour, a northern staple for mantous and noodles, economically sound compared to rice. After dropping him off, my mother would subtly mock his frugality.
“These northerners don’t truly appreciate seafood like we do,” she’d declare from the front seat, a love song to her southern roots.
My father would concur, “We should invite them over sometime and show them a real feast.”
“They’ll be talking about it for weeks!”
“Or maybe,” I ventured, “he simply enjoys mantous and noodles?”
My mother’s head snapped around, her gaze sharp. “Because that’s food for the poor. We are different,” she asserted, a defining melody in her immigrant experience.
2005 marked the year Keira Knightley graced the screen as Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, a film that resonated deeply with me, a cinematic love song. I was captivated by the Bennets’ lamentations of poverty, all while being attended to by five servants. When my Korean American friend Stephanie mentioned owning the DVD, priced at a seemingly exorbitant $25.99 at Costco, I was incredulous. Multiplying it by eight, the approximate USD to RMB exchange rate, the cost equated to a week’s worth of meals in China. Owning such a luxury felt impossibly extravagant for a 13-year-old. How could she afford it, even with a white father?
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“Want to borrow it?” Stephanie offered, sensing my disbelief, a generous note in our friendship’s love song.
“Sure, if you can bring it.”
The next day, she placed the DVD in my hands. “You’re so funny. Why didn’t you believe I had it?” Stephanie asked, genuinely puzzled by my astonishment.
I traced the smooth plastic casing, Keira’s face half-turned, a silent movie star, and merely shrugged, wishing I could vanish.
Once a year, a special occasion awaited at the Costco entrance: pianos for sale. Kawai and Roland uprights stood there, so pristine and beautiful they seemed untouchable. They evoked a wave of nostalgia for the piano left behind in China, the bench where tears of exhaustion mingled with music as I practiced for recitals, my fingers memorizing melodies even when my mind wandered. Sitting at a Costco piano, a forgotten part of myself would awaken. Awkwardly, hesitantly, my fingers would rediscover a language almost lost, playing a fleeting love song. My time was always limited, just a song or two before a sales lady would inquire about my parents.
The pianos, these temporary instruments of memory, would stay for a week, maybe two. Inevitably, on our next visit, they would be gone, leaving behind a silence, a missing melody.
At fourteen, I purchased my first American CD. Britney Spears, against a silver backdrop, glowed in black bra and leather shorts, a black fur hood framing her face – the epitome of beauty in my teenage eyes, a pop love song personified. My Prerogative, the cover declared. Consulting my dictionary, I grasped the meaning: “rights and privilege.” I caressed the glossy cover, oblivious to my parents’ grumbles about the cost. I had surreptitiously added it to their Costco cart and refused to relinquish it. Driving home, “Boys” filled the car, Britney’s whispered “Okay nasty” against Pharell’s breathy vocals creating an awkward silence for my parents, a love song lost in translation.
First grade taught me that leaving food on the plate was the ultimate sin, a lesson reinforced both at school and at home in China. One of the first sentences I learned to read in my Chinese textbook proclaimed that each grain of rice in my bowl was the embodiment of a farmer’s sweat. This was the origin of my sustenance, and leaving even a single grain uneaten was a profound disrespect to those who toiled in the fields. This principle was deeply ingrained in my family. My mother would remain at the table until every morsel of flesh was meticulously stripped from the bone. Then, she would crack the bone to extract the marrow. Finally, the bone fragments would simmer into broth, extracting every last bit of nourishment, a culinary love song to resourcefulness.
I don’t want to appear too greedy, too needy, the way immigrants feel starved for that unnamable thing, no matter how many years they live in their chosen country.
Whenever I expressed any aversion to food, my father would retort, “You’re so lucky. Back when I was your age, I would have given anything for a bite of that,” a poignant refrain in the love song of his past.
I believed him implicitly.
Later in life, researching nutrition, I repeatedly encountered the China Study, conducted by the Campbells in the 1960s. Two American scientists concluded that the lower rates of heart disease among Chinese people were due to their primarily vegetable-based diet, with limited meat consumption. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Many of these lauded “healthy” Chinese eating habits were likely born out of necessity, not choice, a forced love song to survival.
Chinese culture is often described as food-obsessed, and it’s undeniably true. However, it wasn’t until adulthood that I grasped the extent to which this obsession stemmed from intergenerational trauma. Once I recognized the underlying privation in my parents’ faces as they ate chicken, the love song of scarcity playing in their eyes, I couldn’t unsee it. Who were they eating for? Perhaps for their former selves, ghosts forever unappeased. And was this my own reflection in the mirror, my eating habits also a love song to a past I hadn’t personally lived?
After college, I lived alone in North Carolina, enduring a loathsome first job that required weekly travel to obscure corporate client sites. I earned more than my parents ever had, spending it largely on clothes and heels, material love songs to a newfound independence. Some days, I’d drive to Costco and order a Coke and pizza, eating beside families with restless children, greasy, ketchup-smeared hands reaching everywhere. I’d call my parents, dutifully reporting my purchases, the prices, and that I’d eaten the same Costco fare they had enjoyed the previous week, a shared love song of consumerism.
Two years later, I left my corporate job, moving to Texas to teach English. Unloading groceries after a weekend trip, I realized my wallet was missing. My last memory was placing groceries in my car in the Costco parking lot.
Calling the San Antonio Costco, a calm Texan voice assured me my wallet had been found. I had indeed dropped it in the parking lot. Upon retrieving it, I felt an overwhelming urge to hug the man in the red vest, a silent love song of gratitude to a stranger’s kindness.
Sometimes, I visit the Costco in Texas simply to observe other Asian families, projecting my past and future onto them, imagining their unspoken love songs. I watch sensible middle-aged Asian parents, strolling the aisles, searching for Kirkland products for relatives back home: vitamins, salted walnuts, anti-aging creams – gifts carrying the unspoken message of success and a justification for leaving their homeland. Like my parents, they sought the cheapest “Made in the USA” items, tangible symbols of their American dream. I’d invent narratives for them: Did they, like my family, arrive with their Asian neighbors, a convoy of Toyotas descending upon the Costco parking lot every Sunday? Did they buy in bulk their adult children’s favorite foods, freezing them in anticipation of visits home? Did they, too, find a sense of security, a strange kind of home, within the warehouse walls of Costco?
My favorite subjects were young Asian couples, their carts overflowing with toilet paper and granola bars, engaged in mental gymnastics of cost-per-unit comparisons, their love song a quiet harmony of domesticity. In a stroller beside them, a baby would suck his thumb, gazing at the towering mountains of consumer goods, an innocent observer of this unique love song to abundance.
My parents were born in 1962, at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Chinese Famine. Fields lay barren, every edible shoot unearthed, trees stripped of bark. The famine, a result of both natural disasters and disastrous agricultural policies, claimed approximately 35 million lives, a number unknown to my parents at the time. Whispers circulated of bodies in village streets, disappearing without a trace, their stories untold, their love songs silenced.
One of the first sentences I learn to read in my Chinese textbook is that every drop of a farmer’s sweat turns into a pellet of rice in my bowl.
Food scarcity and poverty cast a long shadow over the country for decades. In a grainy beach photograph, my young father and his college friends are shockingly thin, ribs easily countable.
My father grew up on rice porridge, a meager daily love song. As the youngest of six, he occasionally received a desiccated olive to savor, a symbol of favoritism as his siblings watched enviously. He would nurse that single olive throughout an entire meal, the only dish on the table. When guests arrived, his parents would boil an egg, offering it to the visitor, a practical stranger or a bothersome neighbor, while their own children observed from the doorway, imagining the richness of the yolk, the soft crumble of the white – a love song to hospitality in times of scarcity.
Even if they possessed all the gold in the world, my family, like most in China then, couldn’t acquire enough food. Yet, my grandmother hoarded gold throughout her life, a different kind of love song to security. Her final gift to me was a single gold earring, removed from her earlobe at her 94th birthday banquet. She mumbled something toothless in a regional dialect I never learned. My aunt translated, “She says, for your dowry,” a love song to tradition. My grandmother nodded fiercely, pressed it into my palm, and closed my fingers around it.
During the famine, unable to feed six children, my grandparents sent my third aunt, my father’s older sister, to the countryside to be raised by distant relatives. She would somehow survive, they reasoned, a desperate love song of parental sacrifice. But conditions outside the city were even harsher. With other starving farmers, my aunt foraged wild grasses and weeds from the parched earth, boiling them for sustenance. Years later, when she returned to the family, there was no gratitude, no love song of welcome.
“Why is third aunt so fat?” I asked my father in elementary school, an innocent, uncomprehending question.
“She’s not really fat.”
“So does she eat a lot?”
“It has nothing to do with eating,” a love song of unspoken hardship.
My aunt lived the rest of her life with a bloated face, her body swollen from plant toxins ingested in her youth. Each year, she sewed me pajama pants in the ugliest fabrics with elastic waistbands, and every night I still sleep under the duvet covers she made, tangible love songs of a complex family history. She worked at a crematorium, using her connections to secure favorable burial plots for family members, a final, practical love song. In her early sixties, pancreatic cancer claimed her life. We concealed the diagnosis, allowing her to die in blissful ignorance, her love song ending too soon. Within six weeks, she was gone.
Whenever I suggest writing about my parents, they demur, “Why? Our lives are so ordinary. There are a billion of us, nothing remarkable to tell,” a love song of humility, perhaps of denial. Perhaps they are right, in a way, that human suffering, in its myriad forms, is hardly a secret. Yet, sometimes at meals, I feel an emptiness within, as if I am merely a vessel for generations of hunger, eating for my parents, my aunts, my uncles, my ancestors – while others, those unburdened by these ghosts, watch my insatiable appetite with a mixture of horror and incomprehension, a discordant note in the love song of consumption.
After a decade in the States, my parents relocated from the Northeast to Florida, embarking on a new venture: cultivating the swampy land behind their house. The soil, sandy and nutrient-poor, presented a challenge, but their determination was a powerful love song to self-sufficiency. Monthly, they drove an hour to a horse farm for manure. They collected Kikkoman soy sauce buckets from the local Asian grocery, repurposing them as planters for radishes and carrots. My father, with his practical hands, built trellises from wooden planks to support cucumber vines, snow peas, winter squashes, and bitter melons. Their efforts yielded such abundance that they invested in a $3000 industrial freezer for storage. It still surprises me to see their petite figures beside this massive appliance, a testament to their resilience, a love song to hard work.
Despite their ability to grow or purchase most vegetables, Costco remained a habit, a ritual, more than a necessity. They still made the two-hour round trip to Orlando, finding satisfaction in navigating familiar aisles, loading and unloading the car, a love song to routine and familiarity. My father invariably overbought, prompting my mother’s daily anxieties about spoilage, meticulously planning meal orders to minimize waste. Yet, sometimes they would return with only milk and fruit, items easily obtainable at the local grocery, a love song to the simple act of going to Costco.
En route to a family trip to Miami, which I had meticulously planned, we passed a Costco. My mother voiced her desire to stop.
“Now? We’re trying to reach the hotel before traffic,” I protested, irritation creeping into my tone. “Is there something specific you need?”
“No, but I want to go,” she insisted, gazing longingly at the warehouse, a siren song of consumerism. “Maybe pick up some groceries.”
“Mom, we’re staying at the Hyatt Regency. There’s nowhere to cook,” I reminded her, a firm note in my love song to American vacationing. I had forbidden their electric stove, a road trip staple plugged into Motel 8 outlets for cooking Chinese food. This time, I was determined to vacation like an American. I pressed the accelerator.
“Well, maybe I’ll just look…” My mother’s voice trailed off, the warehouse receding from view, a love song interrupted.
One night, a video call from my father appeared unexpectedly. He wanted guidance on eating jamón.
“Where did you find jamón in Florida?” I asked, surprised.
“Costco,” he replied, panning the camera to a whole bone-in jamón resting on their living room floor, a love song to unexpected extravagance.
“Are you having guests?”
“No. Just for your mom and me.”
My parents had never been to Spain, nor had they expressed any fondness for Spanish cuisine. In fact, the one time I had taken them to a Spanish restaurant, they had critiqued the seafood paella, suggesting it would be vastly improved as Chinese fried rice. Their comments on the flamenco dancers were even less complimentary.
Sometimes I go to Costco in Texas just to see other Asians, where I project my past and future onto the families there.
Staring at the enormous cured leg of meat on my screen, I was speechless.
My father refocused the camera on himself. “I thought I’d ask since you went to Spain.”
“I’ve only ever had jamón sliced at restaurants.”
“Well, what’s the point of going all the way to Spain when you can get perfectly good jamón right here at Costco?” a pragmatic love song to Costco’s global reach.
“Is this about my trip to Spain a few months ago, instead of visiting you and Mom in Florida?” I asked, a hint of defensiveness in my voice.
“No. Don’t be immature.”
Silence hung between us for a few moments.
“Want us to save some jamón for you in the freezer?” he offered, a gesture of love, however unconventional. “You can try it when you come back.”
“Okay.” I ended the call, unsure of what defrosted jamón would taste like, but touched by the gesture, a peculiar love song played out in cured ham.
Over the years, amidst our ongoing disagreements about my increasing “Americanness,” food had become the only neutral territory, the safest subject in our conversations. It was also the primary language through which they expressed their love, their unspoken love song. While my white friends received care packages of cookies and candles from home, my parents offered to overnight me live lobsters, bulk-ordered from Costco, a crustacean love song.
Pushing a cart through the vast aisles of the Orlando Costco, my father would load boxes of oranges and blueberries, attempting to “force-feed” me over the following days. I feigned gratitude, knowing the recipients of his generosity were not entirely me, but the ghosts of his past, the hungry children he once was trying to nourish, a love song to a bygone era.
“I never had this growing up,” he’d say, adding another 5-pound box of fruit to the cart, ignoring my mother’s disapproving look, a familiar love song of paternal care. It was a performance they had perfected over years, this dance of giving and receiving, of remembering and forgetting.
Looking up at the stadium-like lighting illuminating the Costco aisles, I realized that within these grand halls, two of their deepest fears were momentarily allayed: the fear of scarcity, of not having enough, and the fear of inadequacy, of not being enough. Here, in the heart of consumer abundance, they found a strange kind of peace, a love song to plenty.
Ten miles away, children queued at Orlando’s Disney World, chasing dreams of fantasy. Here, in Kirkland, my parents lined up at the checkout, finding a different kind of dream realized. Here, I felt most American, most at home in this temple of consumerism, touching everything that lived in the American dream. As we exited, a white woman smiled and waved, “Please come back soon,” a final, welcoming note in the Costco love song.
Yuxi Lin is a poet and writer living and teaching in New York City.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy Editor: Krista Stevens
