A few days ago, my father sent the following email to myself and a handful of other people:
My father is the King of Email Spam, known throughout the whole family as the guy who grants every email equal attention, no matter what the message or who its sender. Continue reading “My Father, King of Spam and Inattention”
Most of my readers know my dad pretty well by now, either because you’re family, friends, or you’ve read my blog for sometime, in which my dad often appears. He’s incapable of crying and still, despite all my explaining, doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in the stuff I write (“Why the hell would anyone want to read about your family?”), but he’s also a huge reason I am the way I am. Uncomplicated but not simple, the strong but far from silent type. Continue reading “K.T. Ho’s Thursday Thoughts”
My mother has a boyfriend.
“His name is José,” she says, slowing pulling the car into the parking lot of the golf club in the hills behind our house. We are headed for the driving range. “I wonder if he’ll be there today. He always drives up in his little maintenance cart and goes, ‘Ooooliviaaaaa! Ooooliviaaaa!’ And then he gives me free balls.”
“Why?”
She shrugs, “He just likes me a lot.”
Continue reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People Like My Mother Does”
My mom has a problem. Maybe it’s a motherly thing, where in conversations you let your daughter go on and on about her trip to London and Italy and then her weekend plans (to DC! For Tom’s nephew’s second birthday) and when she finally asks you how you’re doing, time is running short and you can’t say much so you just nod, “Fine, fine, everything’s good,” and then your daughter, being satisfied that she’s caught her mother up on her life and, it seems, vice versa, decides there really isn’t anything else to say so you both happily hang up.
Except my parents are now in Canada. Continue reading “My Parents Are in Canada”
My mother called today with some urgency in her voice. I braced myself. She has a tendency to begin good and bad news in the same ominous way: “I have something to tell you,” she said. Continue reading “An Update From My Mother”
I don’t often write about my mother, but birth and mothers go hand-in-hand and both days are upon us. Continue reading “A Note on my Mother”
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| In case you were wondering what an “obstructed view” at Carnegie Hall looks like. |
Last weekend, Tom and I went to California for a wedding. Continue reading “A Wedding, A Concert, Anxiety”
Greetings from San Mateo, California, where my brother and sister-in-law live with their newborn baby – my nephew – Dylan and their dog Poochy. Dylan is cute. In all the ways babies ought to be, as though cobbled together from various types of bread: with arms like just-baked dinner rolls, belly like a giant loaf of sourdough, hands and feet like delicate braided pastries and a gleaming, puffy face which, for some reason, reminds me of a doughnut. A glazed donut when he cries. Continue reading “What is Good Parenting?”
Leaving the theater on Wednesday night, I checked my phone and saw that my mother had called during the show. She left a message: Continue reading “Anniversaries: My Mother’s Take”
“You have it too easy,” my aunt said, said stroking my hair, “You’re not depressed. You just have difficulty.” Continue reading “Taipei Jeans: A Flashback”
VERY HIGHBROW 