Drinking Diaries

I NEVER SAW MY FATHER with a drink in his hand; I never saw my mother without one. But my parents were never side by side when I saw them. I am a product of two extremes—half-Chinese, half-American. East and West met in my horribly mismatched parents, then melded in their three offspring: my brother, my sister, and me.

My parents separated when I was two, causing me to bounce between my father’s modest suburban house, which I considered home, and my mother’s dank apartment, which I considered beneath me. The crack in their relationship—I hesitate to call it a marriage, because most of it happened outside the bounds of matrimony—started to form early, much before my time. And it wasn’t only the drink that came between my parents, but politics, upbringing, and a value system they didn’t share. The world had drawn a line between them, and they finally submitted to its existence once and for all.

Born in China and raised in Taiwan, my father bore all the markings of a traditional Chinese man. He was diligent, loyal, faithful, steady, disciplined, responsible, and serious. And my mother? Well, she was American. She gave in easily and often to temptation, and that included drinking. Nevertheless, I loved them both.

Swinging back and forth between them, I sometimes emulated my father and sometimes my mother, as if each parent’s persona were simply a mask to be worn at that particular moment. And when it came to drinking, I was just as confused. Would I be the lush my mother had always been or the teetotaler my father boasted of being?

I was more like my Chinese father but wanted to be more like my American mother. She was the exciting one, the pretty one, the fun one, the easy-to-be-with one. The one who drank. The single woman. She laughed; he yelled. And though I respected my father’s choices, the model of my mother’s lifestyle dangled like a glittering mobile I could never fully shut out of my mind. I began to associate drinking with playfulness, youth, and going out. And being American.

My mother’s language was drinking. She spoke it and lived it, giving the drink more power in her home than she gave herself, a regular and higher placement at the lunch and dinner table and the role of main character in her every story. The drink, and my mother, brought men home, strange men we never saw again. But she didn’t just show us what it was to be a drinker; she taught us. When I was twelve, she gave me a sip of her wine. I asked her once if I could try her beer, but I spit it out before I could swallow it. I remember one of her trademark lines: “No one drinks beer for the taste. It’s just like coffee that way.” My siblings and I had to play along, and we all did or she’d mark us as “your father’s child”—something ugly, bad, and not her. Mom was happy when she drank, giggling until she cried in a way that I loved. But sometimes it made her sad.

My mother drank like the typical American male. When I heard the refrigerator door squeak open and then slam shut, I knew she was headed for the couch with a cold brew. Light beer was her beverage of choice. She drank it straight from the bottle—in front of the television, with lunch, as she cooked dinner, before she went out, on her way to bed. Koozies—those chintzy foam protectors—blanketed the top of our fridge, the bottom shelf of the pantry, the hall closet. They were like an infestation of alcoholism that we—or the apartment—could never be rid of. I had no idea they even had a name.

Shot glasses acted as our passport through Mom’s travels around the world, keeping our cabinet doors from shutting and leaving little room for our sippy cups and water glasses. It was the only way we knew where she’d been when she left us—she was never around for very long. When she left town, she placed us in our father’s care. She rarely sent postcards; she hardly ever called. But when she came home, we’d visit her in the next apartment she’d moved to, discovering a tiny new drinking glass with the latest state or country of her travels etched into its side.

Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d sneak into the dark kitchen and fill one of her shot glasses with apple juice. I felt closer to my mother when I did—as if I had been there with her, as if I’d stood behind her as she’d bought each and every piece of alcoholic-drink ware. Then I’d stare at the Budweiser-magneted fridge and photos of my mother drinking a frozen cocktail through a brightly colored straw. More souvenirs lived in the freezer. Alongside the Popsicles and frozen peas lay frosted beer mugs that she’d slipped into her purse at taverns around town. Those were branded, too: BIG Ass BEER and the name of the bar, usually Woodrow’s. It was the first time I’d seen the word ass in print. When I asked my mom what it meant, she laughed and pushed me away.

Of everything surrounding the way my mother drank, what thrilled me most were the stories of escapades that she joyfully retold around the coffee table. Every one of her nights out started with a killer ensemble and one of her discarded boyfriends recently demoted to the distinguished role of babysitter for the night. I could paint the image of my mother standing against a door: She was beautiful and scintillating, but not in a way that made sense for a mother to be. Black leggings, a low-cut black tank top, bright pink lipstick, dark blue eye shadow, long dangling earrings.

Drinking was more than just a kitchen collectible or a pastime that made her seem cooler than every typical aproned mother. She had horrible luck with cars. At least that’s what I thought. When I got older, I learned why my mother kept getting in “accidents” and why my father, whom she’d long before divorced, kept buying her new modes of transportation. She cycled through her list of reasons for each wreck—hit-and-run; the car had been stolen; a friend had borrowed it. Eventually I realized that most of the time she’d fallen asleep at the wheel after a night of drinking.

I mouthed off to my mother early and often. But it wasn’t until I spoke out against her drinking (“Mom, are your beers getting bigger?”) that she sent me to my room. I refused to apologize, and eventually we silently agreed to pretend she wasn’t drinking more and I wasn’t noticing. In fact, her beers were getting bigger, as was she. Her weight gain came on fast and strong, and it embarrassed me. I used to wonder how different my life would’ve been if my parents had stayed married. Perhaps it would have been just the same.

I never saw my father drink. The only alcoholic beverage to ever take up space in his PG-rated home was wine he received as a gift, left corked on the sideboard in our dining room. I would look over at the bottle—before he’d regift it to an American colleague—in between bites of dinner at the plastic-covered dining table.

We spent holidays with my father, since Mom went notoriously missing on New Year’s Eve and other traditional celebrations. The movies taught me about those festive evenings and how American families celebrated and drank. I learned about spiked punch, alcohol-laden eggnog, and cider mixed with brandy. All of us—the three kids, my father, and the Chinese friends he’d made his family—drew numbers after a potluck dinner for White Elephant, a game we played. Our throats stayed dry. No one drank. No one brought wine even; everyone brought food.

We toasted with food. Instead of beginning with an aperitif, we bit into an eggroll. Instead of popping open a bottle of champagne, we raised our bowls in celebration. And we always overdid it. Every meal commenced with a collection of appetizers, followed by up to ten dishes (gai lan, steamed bok choy, stir-fried green beans, ground pork and tofu, roasted duck, cold steamed chicken, a whole steamed fish, egg scrambled with tomatoes), followed by an imaginative soup (sometimes as simple as seaweed and water), and concluding with dessert (soup made with sweet red beans or egg custard) and fruit.

But it wasn’t just the focus on food that kept our bellies empty of wine. It was being Chinese. I could feel it, even then: the focus on abstinence, the wariness of indulgent behavior. The risk was too great. It might mean a loss of control, and that could mean something much worse: a loss of self-respect. My father lived a life of integrity, and that meant not getting drunk. Abstaining from alcohol fit nicely with the rest of his and his friends’ Chinese ideals—loyalty, fidelity, reverence, humility, respect. I respected him and his self-discipline. I didn’t respect my mother.

Instead of the shot glasses that claimed premium shelf space in my mother’s tiny kitchen, regular drinking glasses and plastic cups got prime real estate in my father’s. The few wineglasses he did own—wedding gifts to him and his second wife (he remarried when I was eleven)—sat tucked away in the back, collecting dust.

I watched my father tell his stories, just as I watched my mother tell hers. I didn’t understand a single word of the Mandarin he spoke, but I knew that his anecdotes didn’t need the help of alcohol to spill out, as my mother’s did. The bottles of Ozark spring water in his friends’ hands clued me in. At those Chinese-only gatherings, there was never any alcohol in sight. I saw my father break this unspoken rule only on the rare occasions he invited Americans to the house, when he stocked ice chests with Budweiser along with cans of Coke and bottles of water. He made his prejudice very clear: Americans drank; Chinese didn’t. But I took it as a cultural norm, one that confused me. I was a Chinese American. What kind of drinker would that make me?

I tried my first beer on my own when I was going on eighteen. A freshman in college, I’d made my first friend in biology class, a Mexican guy whose wallet was attached to his pants by a metal chain. He was like no one I’d ever met. I was the teacher’s pet, the girl with glasses who sat in the back row making straight A’s. I wasn’t cool. But this guy was. His name was Francisco (Cisco), and he taught me that drinking was not only a rite of passage but a skill. I quickly learned the rules of the game.

I don’t remember if he asked if I ever drank before; I think he just assumed that I had. I can’t blame him, really. I was introverted and shy, and people often mistook that for experienced and coy. But I was neither, even when I so desperately wanted to be. I took my first voluntary drink in his dorm room in the middle of the day. It felt like truancy. He popped open a tiny refrigerator door and offered me a Guinness. I couldn’t say no. I had to be cool. I was in college now. After I let the cold liquid burn my throat, I felt deflowered, as if it—and he—had taken a piece of my virginity. As if I had been raped of my sobriety. I’d wanted to say no, truly, but it was as if I’d be exiled from college life if I did.

But this—drinking—wasn’t me. I felt like I was cheating on myself. I hated the feel of the bottle in my hand, the glass on my lip, the taste of it, the way it felt going down. I hated it for being a vice. For being my mother’s vice. And in using it, I was letting down my father, the person whose very core character I knew I had within me. But drink I did, for altogether different reasons than my mother did. I didn’t need it and didn’t care if I ever drank again. I did it because drinking was being young and single and cute. And for a moment, that’s what I wanted to be.

“You don’t want to be social with those kinds of people,” my father once said after seeing me with Cisco, the boy with dark skin and baggy jeans. His disapproval made me feel as if the beer had stained my teeth with paternal infidelity. Suddenly I remembered all that I loved about my mother—her twinkling eyes, her Marilyn Monroe mouth, her transcendent beauty, her charm, her likability. The alcohol made her that way, I convinced myself. It turned her volume up and made her the belle of the ball. The booze took away any self-consciousness that made her as hesitant as the rest of us were. And it was the drink that would make me as desirable as she was. As attractive. As popular. With booze, I’d find a boyfriend, hold hands with him, and go on dates on Saturday nights. Then I’d have something to tell that cadre of girls I’d meet, who would love me and call me to tell me everything and even give me keys to their apartments. Booze would make me one of them. An All-American Girl.

When I finally left home, not long after my eighteenth birthday, it was for a guy named Kenneth, a twenty-six-year-old from Singapore who became my first real boyfriend. A bartender at a campus restaurant, he experimented on me during our first night together with every brand of liquor in his fully stocked cabinet. But our affair with drinking became only a one-night stand. After that night, we never drank again. He’d have beer that never got opened in the fridge. He had wine for guests in the pantry, which we forgot about. We chose to eat instead, and I gained thirty pounds before I finally left him for another, different, older, this time American man.

Joe taught me how to drink like an adult. He had the money and class to mentor me about fine dining, gin and tonics, martinis, and good wine. With him I learned to use drinking as a crutch. It intoxicated me enough to convert me into the extrovert I was only pretending to be. To stay in that relationship I had to forget about being shy. I had to go to cocktail parties and laugh at jokes I didn’t find funny, and smile and nod and remember people’s names. If it was a dry party—a daytime endeavor, a barbeque, a picnic—my lips stayed sealed, and the man in my life shut his mouth, too, not calling for at least a week while he mused on whether I was the right partner for him. I wasn’t.

Single again, I dried up, until I met the three girls I’d been looking for my whole life. With women, I drank like my mother—too much and too often—trying my best to indoctrinate myself into a society that age and culture said I belonged in.

I was single and female, and that meant I was a lush. But of course, no one ever calls it that. No one ever acts like drinking every single night to the point of being drunk is anything less than normal—not when you’re in your twenties, and certainly not when you’re cute. I had found the life I’d always yearned for, the girl’s existence I’d always craved: I had been invited into a foursome of females. Hour by hour, we told each other what a rough night we’d had—the fast food we found on our faces when we woke up; how we almost didn’t make it home. Every poor decision was a badge of honor, and the worse the decision was—and the more fried food and alcohol it involved—the better. Excessive drinking was the only criterion for admission into this little club, and so I complied. I was known as “the nurser” for drinking far more slowly than they did, and I made up grand tales of debauchery to match theirs. At home alone, I never drank, though I told them I did.

Illness finally saved me from myself. Lupus, an autoimmune disorder, pushed me to face who and what I was. And wasn’t. It wasn’t just the drink that was fogging my mind, but my own detachment from my true self. When I finally broke away from this group of women, I found myself, the every-once-in-a-while drinker I always was. Not my mother or my father but something in between. A Chinese American Girl.