Being a Japanese-Swedish combo family means American traditions such as Thanksgiving should be meaningless. Still, my parents have insisted on recognizing this ritual my whole life. Their sentimentality is charming, but it never fails to backfire. This leaves my family longing for societies deprived of Hallmark obligations.
Preparing for the event is almost as traumatic as the dinner itself. The four of us drive around looking for the cheapest, least crowded grocery store. By the time we get there, fight for the food and return home in time to walk the dog, a whole day has passed. Suddenly, my sister is having a panic attack trying to calculate how many hours it takes to defrost X pounds of turkey. This has always seemed unnecessary to me. Having immigrated recently, we don’t have any relatives around and friends avoid our invitations, so it is just the four of us. Yet my family insists on purchasing the largest turkey possible each year, ranging from 20 to 25 pounds of bird. I often wonder why we can’t simply agree on a smaller size; I’m sure that my sister would much appreciate it.
Somehow, the table gets set and the dinner begins to take shape. Candles are lit, yams are mashed, bottles of wine are drunk and a Bible sits in the center of it all. As my father, the Swede, picks it up, the three women roll their eyes and giggle with each other. Being as unfamiliar with the text as those before it, my father never has a particular passage in mind. Nevertheless, he reads whatever page he opens to in a declarative voice that suggests the opposite. At some point my Japanese mother defies her traditional role and yells, “No!” as she often does to protest my father.
This, my sister and I know, is the first of many dramatic episodes the family will witness tonight. My mother’s outburst may have begun it, but my father’s annoyed glances and refusal to put the book down continue it. More wine is drunk and I find myself trying to talk over my father’s reading with awkward conversation starters like how school is going. Resentfully, the Bible is put down, and my mother gets up only to put it away. The awkward conversations resume.
My sister sways from side to side in a roundabout way as she often does after drinking wine. My mother refuses to eat anything as she often does after drinking wine. My father talks about the badness of Bush and the goodness of Michael Moore and his plans for how to escape this country he once struggled so hard to enter. I sit quietly, thankful that my antidepressants and psychotherapy sessions have been treating me successfully.
My mother’s drunkenness rarely stays in a calmed state. Soon, she hallucinates, talking to people only she can see. She answers the phones only she can hear ring. She insists that there is a large gathering of rare animals in one of the upstairs rooms. I am amused but my mother is terrified. Her paranoia has not yet gotten out of hand, but just then my father, equally drunk, playing violent opera records at volumes louder than even I, after years of punk rock shows, can handle. My mother insists on retaliating further. She climbs the stool placed in front of the piano she once played as a professional in Japan. Marriage has reduced her playing to special occasions such as this. Her arms fling into the air above her head and come crashing down onto the keys below. She plays like this for hours, carefully selecting only the most depressing of pieces. It is shocking how well she manages, considering her lack of practice and, of course, her current state of mind.
I distract myself by snapping photos for the albums and cleaning the table in preparation for dessert. My sister has already run downstairs where she frantically calls through her phonebook and IMs the entirety of her buddy list in a desperate and pathetic attempt to save herself. She decides to go to the hookah bar. The dog has retreated to his kennel where he chews the hair underneath his tail. A couple of years ago he adopted this habit as a form of stress relief, the veterinarian explained.
In the end, I am sitting alone at the table eating slice after slice of pumpkin pie knowing that it will only come back out of my mouth and into the toilet. Sensing my panic, my father puts his hand on my shoulder to say, “You know, the average American family is dysfunctional. People don’t really like Thanksgiving …” I appreciate his words but refuse to accept them. This is not the average dysfunctional American family. This is mine and I enjoy their peculiar company. For this reason, and only this reason, Thanksgiving has never been a torture for me.
