Moonbreaks

Traditionally in America there is a summer break (from the days when kids were needed to work the farm on flourishingly hot summer days); Thanksgiving break (to allow for devouring turkey, sticky rice, pumpkin pie, tofurky – whatever your family tradition might happen to be); winter break (which usually coincides with Christmas and the Gregorian New Year, but not Hanukkah); and spring break (is there a particular reason besides glorious weather?). These breaks from learning are somewhat uniform throughout the nation. So maybe my school lets out in May instead of April like my sister, and my spring break is a week earlier as well, but our schools all more or less follow the same pattern. What they don’t follow is the pattern of having breaks when it matters to us. We still have school over our new year. Followers of the Gregorian calendar have the day off because of the dominance of the calendar in the world. Even the Jewish students are allowed to miss school for a religious holiday and the Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) is considered such. Yet when the Taiwanese Lunar New Year rolls around, we’re lucky if someone says “Hey, it’s a moonless night tonight.” Two important Taiwanese celebrations fall between those traditional American vacation times. The Lunar New Year – between winter and spring break – and the Moon Festival – between summer and Thanksgiving break. There are never any allowances for skipping school for such festivals. After all, both merely celebrate the phases of a universal phenomenon. When my sister had her car, she would usually drive home every few weekends or so. This time last year, she probably came home to drink oolong tea, eat mooncakes, and enjoy home cooked meals. Since she no longer has a way to get home on her own, she must rely on others. And because people in her college town tend to make the journey to St. Louis only during one of those coveted long weekends/breaks, she can’t make it back home this year for the Moon Festival. How disappointing since in the refrigerator are lots of mooncakes – with fig, pineapple, and green bean (her personal favorite) filling. So simply because our traditions don’t conform to educational traditions, my sister misses out on one of life’s happy and delicious celebrations. I could save her some of those mooncakes, like my mom wants to do, but my logic says that they won’t taste quite the same after sitting in the freezer until Thanksgiving. Jessica is quite happy as the Moon Festival marks the advent of autumn and cooler weather. She has two sisters. One is majoring in aerospace engineering, the other works in fashion in New York City (where mooncakes are probably easily found if one looks in the right places). Both plan to come home for Thanksgiving.

And In The Other Corner

A friend once said, "People say 'Pasta is so boring!' It’s not boring! If you think it is boring then you don't understand pasta! If you don't understand pasta, you don't understand the culture!" I understand pasta. I love pasta. It comes in a huge variety of shapes (ziti, cavatelli, spaghetti, bowtie, alphabet), sizes (anellini, capellini, lasagna, jumbo shells, manicotti), and textures (rigate, ligate, fusili) and can easily be paired with any food group. And the sauces - it is hard to go wrong with the sauces. My refrigerator, hardly ever prepared for a preplanned meal (since when do we preplan meals in this house anyway?), is almost always stocked with excellent sauce materials. Simmer some canned tomato sauce, sauté a few homegrown bell peppers, crystallize some dried up onions, chuck in some of that unused deli roast beef – voila! Or add extra virgin olive oil, some Canadian steak spices, a dash of cranberry juice, a handful of lonely mushrooms. With all these options, how can pasta be boring? Rice on the other hand does get boring to me. I am ashamed to say it because it means, by previous definition, that I don't understand rice. I don't understand the culture. It's not that I don't want to understand the culture. I desperately want to understand the culture. If it could be done, I might look into cultivating rice in a rice paddy in my backyard. Fortunately the climate isn’t right, because then mosquitoes would breed even more ridiculously fast. When I come home from practice or a pre-lunch or pre-dinner run, I often crave pasta. A good, hearty, multi-wholegrain pasta with a vegetable-tomato sauce. Or rigatoni swimming in marinara sauce. Any dish really. Usually I am not in the mood for the rice cooking away in the rice cooker. I’ve given some thought to the question of which is the better carbohydrate to carbo-load on – pasta (any) or rice (white)? Through extensive, fascinating scavenger hunts with the help of Google, I’ve read about carbohydrates, glycogen, and the glycemic load. All I’ve discovered is what I’ve already known. Pasta is good. But finding information on rice is a little harder. Reports always glorify brown rice and subtly suggest that brown rice is far, far better than white basmati rice. What I eat is neither of those. I eat fluffy, white, Taiwanese rice. Or at least as close as I can get in America. Asian friends have often boasted about eating rice every day. I don’t say the staple of my diet is rice because it isn’t. In fact, I have no idea what is the staple of my diet (..water?). Because I don't eat rice everyday, I sometimes feel a little out of touch with my inherited culinary culture, and a little embarrassed that I get bored with a daily serving or two of rice. One day, I’ll have to sit down with a bowl of rice and have a heart to heart. We’ll eke out our differences and the rice will understand that I devour complex carbohydrates, llike vegetable sauces for pasta, and enjoy more savory side dishes to pair with the fluffy whiteness of rice. And I will understand that rice is the musician in the background to all those rice dishes, that each grain of rice grows only to a certain size, that it can be mashed into flour for a variety of other foods, and that it likes the company of other grains of rice. But for now, I’m going to finish my bowl of oatmeal. Jessica has sketchy outlines of pre-race foods to eat. She prefers to steer away from dairy products, excessive citric acid, and St. Louis Bread Company asiago cheese bagels, though the latter she enjoys devouring after races.

Working as the TACL Journalism Internship Coordinator

Over the summer I got an internship to work with the Pacific Times, located in Rosemead, California. The Pacific Times is a non-profit community newspaper, focusing on Taiwanese issues in the surrounding area of Southern California. My job was to be the coordinator of the high school journalism interns who wrote a spread for the newspaper every two weeks. Basically, my internship was to take responsibility of younger interns. The downside of this job was, I’m not leadership material. I didn’t know how to go about planning events, or making sure people wrote their stories on deadline. However, I decided to give it my best shot. Our first meeting surprised me and I realized that things wouldn’t be as hard as I thought. After all, I was working with juniors and seniors from high school. They should be responsible enough to meet the deadlines and we could all be friends. This got me excited, but unfortunately I set my hopes too high. First, it was hard planning what events they wanted to go to, because I forgot that not everyone has the same interests as me. I planned for the kids to go to a Ninja Art exhibition, but the boys didn’t seem all that interested in art. I wanted to take them to a comedy show, but I forgot that they are all under age. This was going to be hard. As the weeks went by, things didn’t get easier. I was having a hard time connecting with the girls I had to work with most of the time. I didn’t realize there was such a difference between high school students and college students. Even though I’m in college, it’s not like I’m that old. I thought I could connect with them easily. I tried talking about anything that might interest them; college, sports, celebrities, boys. None of it worked. The highlight of the internship was going to cool events. We went to one where semi-famous celebrities gave speeches. Actors Roger Fan and Sung Kang from Better Luck Tomorrow, Tokyo Drift, and Annapolis were there. The director of those movies, Justin Lin, let us have an interview with him. Later on into the internship, we started taking trips together with all the interns, not just one or two. I finally started to become friends with some of the interns and I realized that they respected me as a person. This is when things started going smoothly and I offered them advice about high school and college, other things that were ahead of them. Finally, the job was going the way I wanted. I realized that just because I am Taiwanese and I was working for a Taiwanese organization with other Taiwanese students, that didn’t necessarily make things easier for me, or connect with the people faster. I had to work hard to figure out other people’s interests as well. The funny thing is, the girl I was closest with in the program was from Hong Kong. In the end I’m glad that I got the job and went through with it. Now I know that I can be a leader when I have to, and that sometimes it may be harder to connect with my own people than others. However, I always like a challenge so I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Julienne is finished with her internship with TACL-LA Chapter. She is now back in school at BU and continuing on to her junior year. The Pacific Times website is www.pacific-times.com and features a "Youth Forum" section in English.