On the fourth of July, my parents would pile us kids and the beagle into our tiny yellow Fiat, roll down all the windows, and head out through the dusty streets of Beijing until we hit the country side. On the way, my mom read us Little House on the Prairie, and then we’d sing patriotic songs. We always went to the same village – it had a small river flowing through it, with huge boulders that had been pushed into the water, so that if you were brave, you could jump along them and cross the river. The river was bordered by trees that were hundreds of years old, and provided the perfect shade for picnics. We’d sit on the river banks and eat hot dogs and chips from the Lido store and apple pie. I always got mustard on something. Always. While we were eating, my mom would read the Declaration of Independence, and then we’d all say the Pledge of Allegiance. And then we’d break – and go running along to the boulders, jumping from one to the other – my brother always going first because he wasn’t afraid of anything. Everyone fell in eventually. It’s funny, because I’m thinking about this, and I tried to remember if my mom ever got mad at us for getting wet. But I don’t have a single recollection of her doing anything except jumping along with us. My dad was taking pictures, and I wish I’d had a camera back then, so I could have taken pictures of him.

Summers are the most American time of year. As a kid, I’d sit on the edge of the balcony of our  apartment building, and pretend it was the yard of a house in a suburb in California – like the one my grandmother lived in. I’d read Encyclopedia Brown, and wish that our complex had mysteries to solve. I wanted an American summer so much I even tried to teach my friends from Pakistan how to play baseball – which I felt was far more economical (in terms of time) than cricket.

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I had a lucky, happy, and exceptionally scenic childhood – and in retrospect I’m glad I didn’t grow up in a California suburb – it made my life a little different. But summers, in spite of the memories of Chinese villages – always will be  quintessentially and fantastically American.

Now, as an adult, I experience summers without the break of school. But the weekends are good, and friends and family go to the parks and sit on the front stoop, and the time slips away from me. It’s only June, I know – and I shouldn’t be nostalgic yet, but this summer is already going by too fast.

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We had a family slideshow/sideshow last night, and my dad had a picture of the family dog at the airport in 1996. I was 15, and it was the year that the Chinese government banned dogs. Um. Yeah, not really sure about the whole story there. But anyway, I was going on a trip to California, and Polly (the beagle) was coming with me.

So, while ostensibly, it was a picture of the dog…. I was in the background. As I gazed at the picture, something came into focus for me that made my scalp crawl and my bum clench.

I was wearing a fanny pack. And birkenstocks.

Now I could try and justify it and say that the fanny pack was black, and blended into my shirt, and that really, when you send a 15 year old across the world, you want their documents close to them…. but really, what’s the use? Instead, I turned to my mother, and I said. “I looked like an aging lesbian. WHY did you not STOP me?”

And she said, “Tai Li, I tried.”

Photos by Forrest Anderson, photographer extraordinaire, and my DAD.

My dad spent the better part of his career working as a photographer for Time Magazine. He photographed all sorts of politicos, artists, weirdos (and occasionally, all three in one). He and my mother (who was a journalist for the AP) are China-philes. I think there’s an actual word for it, like Anglophile… hold on, I’ve gotta Google it. (Huh, did you know that “chionophiles” are: n. any animal that thrives in winter conditions, particularly snow?) Ok, the word I’m looking for is apparently sinophiles. So, my parents are sinophiles, people who love China. Right, that’s how I ended up being named Tai Li. We’ve been through this before.

Now my very cool parents live in North Carolina instead of Beijing – and while I know that they are just waiting for the remaining chillins’ to finish school so that they can go galivanting about the world again – they haven’t stopped doing what they love. My dad can’t breathe without a camera within arms’ reach, and he continues to chronicle his surroundings in breathtaking photographs that he posts on his blog Natural Selections. (He also posts totally rockin’ China-related photos in his other blog Words & Pictures).

I was 16. I’m the stoned looking one in the middle.

I tried sardines today, for no other reason than the fact that I haven’t before. They’re not as bad as you might think – certainly better than mushy canned tuna fish – although the little marinated spines freak me out a little bit. But the flavor of the sardines was rich, milder than I expected, and very meaty. It’s filling and I’m hoping the omega-3′s do lovely things for my hair and skin. As I forked a fillet o’ sardine into my mouth, my grandmother and sister watched me carefully, with intermittent groans and no attempts to conceal their horror.

It’s because I’ve been reading Fuchsia Dunlop’s books about Sichuanese cooking, and she talks about the difference between Chinese palates and Western palates – and how the Chinese have ‘weird’ things in their food because they have a different attitude toward the odd textures, the offal, and the strangely chewy meaty bits. Instead of thinking of them as less desirable or gross, the unusual textures are carefully prepared to emphasize their own unique culinary adjective. I was at a Taiwanese restaurant in Provo one time, and I ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup. Because I ordered in Chinese, and asked for extra xiancai (pickled vegs) on the side, she asked if I wanted the beef in my soup the Chinese style or the American style. “You know how Americans are about their meat,” the Laobanniang said to me. “They don’t like the healthy meat.”

I did know what she meant. In China and Taiwan, the pieces of meat with fat, gristle, and tendons are relished in a long stewed broth like beef noodle soup. The collagen in the meat releases into the broth, giving it a silky mouth feel, and it’s supposed to be good for your hair and skin. Americans, however, prefer their meat lean, clean, and free of any other reminder that their meat is actually meat, from an animal that used to be alive. We call pig meat pork and cows beef – what’s so wrong with being honest about what you’re putting into your mouth? I chose the Chinese style.

I remember sitting on a bench in the park with my aiyi, chopstick shoveling braised beef over rice that she had brought from home. “Try this,” she said, handing me a clear, glistening, golden noodle like thing. It was chewy, salty and delicious. “What is it?” “Tendon,” she said, handing me another piece. As I chewed, she looked at 6 year-old me with a peculiar satisfaction and said, “Ni chi de hao xiang ah.”

I don’t really know to to translate that – the Chinese character (which I can’t figure out how to get into WordPress) is xiang – the word for fragrant. But like so many Chinese words, the context of it changes subtly, depending on how you mold it into your conversation. When my aiyi said, “You eat so fragrantly”, she didn’t mean that I emitted perfume as I ate – rather, she was experiencing that particular joy of sharing food with someone who is open enough to connect with the food in a pure way – responding to taste and nourishment on a purely corporeal level, without the fetters of preconceived cuisine boundaries. To eat fragrantly is to show honest enjoyment, a gusto that makes other people want to enjoy it also. I’ve been thinking about that lately, wondering if I’d feel the same way now – if someone handed me a glassy pipe of cooked beef tendon, would I stick it in my mouth, savoring the way it saltily resisted the pressure of my teeth? Or would I let some arbitrary cultural notion of what things should be like get in the way of experiencing something new and possibly incandescent?