Cory

When I think of my childhood, the overwhelming emotion is happiness. I remember a full and lively house, and going on all sorts of adventures with the family. We had a lot of freedom as children. Especially compared to the way things are today, but even I think for the times.

Being the youngest of the brothers, I was in the unique position of seeing the house in basically every configuration of residents there was. Starting with 8(!) of us, Gung Gung and Pua Pua, my parents, and the four boys, and eventually trickling down to 3 as everyone slowly moved on our out.

I’ll try and write this in chronological order, using the residents of the house as my anchor.

Gung Gung

Sadly, I have almost no memory of my dad’s dad—who I called Gung Gung—as he passed away when I was quite young. My memories of Gung Gung are mostly just the few photos of the man that were in the lower floors of the house. One was in a curved frame in Baba’s office that always appeared to be looking at you, like the Mona Lisa. A second picture showed him standing with what I think was a two-headed llama (a pushmi-pullyu from Dr. Dolittle?) that hung in my bedroom. I think for most of my childhood I thought that two-headed llama was real, and I still don’t know the story of the picture (though I think it must have something to do with his time in the film industry). I also remember having great fun playing with Gung Gung’s old canes, using them as swords and weapons.

Pua Pua

Pua Pua (my dad’s mom) stayed with us for much longer than Gung Gung, and I have many fond memories of her time there. Pua Pua was always feeding us, making mantou—these little white balls of fluffy dough—and cha shu bao—a similar Chinese dough ball filled with BBQ pork. I would cover the mantou with butter and sugar and it was always such a treat. She also made a mean English muffin pizza, with I think bolognese sauce and a slice of American cheese in the toaster oven.

By the time I was old enough to remember her, Pua Pua was starting to slow down, but I remember playing card games with her when I was small. We would play a game called “crazy 8’s” which was similar to Uno where you had to try and play out your cards but could only play the same suit or number as the top card in the stack, and you had to draw cards until you got something you could play. I remember whenever I would have to take a lot of cards in a row she would say “Have some more! Have some more!” and laugh and laugh. It’s possible that she was the first person to teach me trash talk.

Life with the four boys

My memory of living in Glengarry with the four boys is pretty fuzzy. And I guess that makes sense! If Mike and Greg went to college at the age of 17, then I was only 5 and 7, respectively, when they left. Coincidentally, those are the exact ages of my two kids today, so I have a fuzzy sense of what I was like, and it kind of makes sense that I don’t remember too much about that time. I remember Greg being in the house a bit more, which also makes sense since it was a few years longer. I remember almost nothing about Mike being around apart from some family vacations—and it’s possible those memories have been crafted more from hearing stories than actually experiencing them. But the houseboat trip with Uncle Jeff, some iguanas in Cozumel, and Tim tumbling down the steepest trail at Killington with Greg fearlessly bombing down after him carrying his skis are all ones that stick out. There is also a memory of myself falling into a giant pool of mud, feeling very sad, and having Mom break out laughing when she saw me (only making me sadder). I have no idea where or when that was.

I also remember playing (or probably, watching) some video games from that era, on the original Nintendo. There was Metroid, which was super hard. Jaws—which involved pressing a button to shoot missiles from your submarine so much that we called fast button pressing in any game a “Jaws thumb”. And a game called simply “Ice Hockey” where you played hockey with a team made up of big fat guys, little skinny guys, and in-between guys. We had names for all those guys—the fat ones we called “Udos”, maybe after someone Greg knew? It’s strange what you remember.

Life with Tim

I think Tim graduated high school in 1995, which means it was just the two of us kids in the house from when I was 7 to about 13. Tim and I were about five years apart which is a bit of an awkward gap between brothers. I think Tim was a bit too young to be a pure “caretaker” of me—which is probably how Mike and Greg felt. But also I was probably a bit too young to be a good peer or friend to Tim. So our relationship was probably a bit one-sided, with Tim often forced to babysit or entertain me, but me never really being able to challenge or fully-interest him. But either way, from my perspective, I loved playing with TIm—even if he always beat me at everything.

We had a little basketball hoop called a “Jordan jammer” in the hallway and would play basketball there for hours. Or sometimes we’d shut the big sliding doors for the kitchen and living room and play some kind of soccer game in that little closed space. Or we’d play wiffle ball in the front yard. Or basketball in the driveway. Or ping pong in the basement. Or Nintendo/Sega in the throne chairs in the living room. Or Tetris on ancient Game Boys connected by a wire. I remember loving all these different games and also, almost literally, never winning against Tim. I think all that losing must have been good for my character though.

As I got older (probably into my teenage years), Tim took on more of a mentorship role in my life, which was incredibly useful. He would teach me how to study for tests, how to make friends and get girls to like me, and how to navigate the complicated dynamics of throwing high school parties under our parents’ noses.

After Mike and Greg left, the family vacations with just the four of us took on a different dynamic, but were always still fun. I remember going with Tim and my parents to places like Hawaii, Jamaica, Cabo San Lucas, and Hong Kong. We went to Cabo a lot after getting a time share there.

We played a lot of cards on those vacations. Everyone was into it, and everyone was quite competitive! There was a famous incident involving Mom throwing a Ring Ding over a card game, I think? With the four of us we played a lot of hearts, bridge, and asshole (which we sometimes called “loser”). Everyone would try to count cards, and Tim would occasionally manage to “shoot the moon” in hearts—the hardest and best thing you could do in the game. In asshole, one of the rules is that the winner (the president) can tell the loser (the asshole) what to do. And I remember that Baba liked to ask the asshole to massage his back. He’d lie on the ground and yell “Chop!” and then we’d do these fast karate chops on his back.

The Cabo trips were very relaxing. We’d spend a lot of time hanging out at the hotel, lying by the pool, playing ping pong, and getting super, super tan. Tim convinced me it was very important to get super tan—that the girls would like it—so we would just lie in the sun for hours and hours. One time I got back to school after a week in Cabo and my history teacher said “well I see some of you went away for vacation and got some tans. And Cory changed his race!”

Life with Mom and Baba

When Tim went to MIT in 1995, the house got a lot quieter, and my memory of family time is more sparse. I guess at that point I was entering my rebellious teen years and probably didn’t want to spend that much time with my parents. That said, I don’t recall ever going through a phase where I didn’t like or respect Mom and Baba. I think I just became much more interested in my friends and peers. But I still have good memories: Baba teaching me how to drive stick shift in the High School parking lot, watching Seinfeld re-runs every night together, and playing intense games of Scrabble with Mom after dinner.

Since I no longer had siblings to travel with, I remember my parents would let me invite friends (and girlfriends) on our family vacations. We did one road trip with my friend Ben out West, where we went to several national parks and eventually ended up in Las Vegas. My strongest memory of Vegas was “virtual sky diving,” which basically means getting blown up in the air in a giant wind turbine. I think Ben and I begged them to do it, and they were worried about safety, but they ultimately let us anyway.

This was kind of representative of a general sense of trust and independence that my parents always did an impressive job fostering in us. They gave us kids a lot of leeway to make our own decisions. I don’t remember any rules around basically anything in the house. We could—I believe—do as much TV/video games as we wanted, choose when to do our homework and study, see friends and have sleepovers whenever we wanted, drink and have parties at the house, and so on. And when we messed up—which I did a lot in those teenage years—we didn’t get grounded or anything. It was just “I’m disappointed in you.”

I think that laissez-faire style of parenting was more common in that era, but Mom and Baba were still outliers on the scale. And I think it really worked well! They set the big-picture principles: it’s good to be honest, do well at school, be kind, and so on. But by extending their trust to us to fill in the details, they made us want to be trustworthy, so we followed through on our own. I always did my homework and got good grades. And I think by being somewhat self-directed in it, I think I became much more independent and prepared for college and beyond.

Which is not to say that I always had good judgement. In my high school years I got into a lot of trouble with drinking and drugs, which was an incongruity with my straight-A grades that I think confused my parents and teachers alike. But for whatever reason—either I didn’t handle substances well, or just got extremely unlucky—it seemed like for all of high school, I, or someone around me, was getting caught drinking or doing drugs. We’d go to a concert and a friend would get taken into police custody. Or I’d get kicked out of a dance for drinking. Or kicked out of model UN for drinking. Or arrested for smoking marijuana. After that one I actually had to enter a program called “Clean Start” where they drug test you and bring you to jails and juvenile delinquent centers and try to scare you straight. I remember one of the inmates on our prison visit telling us how he once saw someone get pulled out of the showers with a broom shoved up his butt after a fight! I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go to prison after that.

What’s most remarkable about all this is that I don’t ever remember my parents coming down on me for any of that! Like—I’m sure they worried, and I don’t think I ever fully appreciated how much stress that may have put on my parents. But also it kind of felt like they were still in my corner when these things happened. We would blame my suspension on the overeager Vice Principal who wanted to see someone get busted. I was just a mostly-innocent victim.

College and beyond

In the summer before I went to university, we got a golden retriever named Hazel. In my mind the dog was “mine”, but of course my parents must have known they’d be inheriting her once I left, and perhaps it was a plan of theirs to ease the transition to having an “empty nest” at home.

Hazel was a great dog! She was particularly energetic and happy, even for a golden. One of the things she liked to do was tie herself up in knots with her leash. She would jump over it and spin around and get her legs all tangled up in it, then try and get herself back out. Mom used to say she must be a genius to want to solve puzzles like that! I think that said more about Mom than it did about Hazel.

My first year of college at UC Berkeley was quite isolated, and I don’t have too many memories that are relevant to the family. But when I transferred back to MIT the following year, I got to be close to the family again and to participate in what was probably the longest-running and best family tradition: the Sunday Dinner.

I don’t know when Sunday dinners started. My guess is maybe when Mike or Greg went to college? In my mind, they were always there like a drumbeat punctuating our lives, week after week. Every Sunday, Baba would spend the afternoon preparing an incredible feast for the whole family. Usually there were 6-7 dishes pulled from his repertoire: steamed fish, crab salad, steamed eggs, bok choy, beef and onions, sichuan chicken, whisky shrimp, bon bon chicken and many more. And everyone would come home for dinner, and we would eat and catch up. Baba was a whirlwind in the kitchen, delivering plate after plate of hot food to us, and only sitting down after he’d finished everything.

Sunday dinners were the thread that kept the family together as we moved apart. It was always a huge decision to bring a new girlfriend to Sunday dinner for the first time. Eventually, when Mike and Jane got married and started having kids, it became the way that I saw those kids grow up.

Alongside Sunday dinners, the other family checkpoints during this period were our reunion trips. As the older brothers each got married and started having kids, these got harder and harder to schedule with the whole family. But I do have some great memories of vacations in this period, which got more ambitious and international, perhaps because Mom and Baba could now afford them.

There was Turks and Caicos, a trip where I—being the only one there without a partner—spent three days getting scuba certified. There was Costa Rica, where we hiked in the jungles and saw tons of natural wildlife. There was Ecuador and Galapagos, probably the most spectacular natural place I’ve ever visited, with incredible biodiversity, and animals that were completely unafraid of people.

And there was a trip to Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, where Baba got to show us around some of the places he grew up. That last trip ended with me meeting up with a co-worker of mine named Rowena for a work event, and spending a few days together in a beach town in Thailand. We were both in relationships with other people at the time, but that trip planted a seed of interest, which, several years later, turned into dating, and, eventually, marriage.

Becoming a parent

It wasn’t until I became a parent myself—seven years ago—that I started to think about, and appreciate, the things that were unique and good about my own upbringing. As I think about the type of children I want to raise and the values I want to give them, I find myself appreciating the childhood that Mom and Baba passed on to me even more.

I mentioned already how they gave us a lot of trust, setting us up with strong values, but letting us make our own mistakes. This is something I’ve come to appreciate more and more, as I see many parents trying to remove obstacles from their kids’ lives instead of giving them the tools to overcome them. Or as one of my favorite parenting quotes goes: “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.”

Another big one that I associate with Baba is honesty. My memory from childhood was that it was ok to make mistakes, but it was not ok to lie about them. Which is such a great lesson! Even to this day I have a hard time lying—and I like that. It feels great to live a life where I’m not being deceitful, and it’s hard to imagine doing anything different.

Something I also alluded to above in the context of getting in trouble, but I’ll say more strongly now, is a complete and unwavering support for their children. I think Mom especially was like this—perhaps because her own childhood was such an opposite experience. But Mom lives the idea that her children can do no wrong. This security is such a powerful thing to give a child! I think maybe I’m a bit too much of a realist to fully do the same with my kids, but I love the idea of them knowing that no matter what happens, I will always be in their corner.

The last one I’ll mention—which seems fitting to end on—is relationships. Mom and Baba’s relationship is truly special. The way they love and support each other and were each others’ best friends. The way they collaborated and complemented each other professionally. And the way they treated each other as equals. These values stuck with me and ultimately shaped how I found and navigated my own marriage to Rowena. The equality thing is hard sometimes! It’s to blame for little Victor’s last name being “Luk” instead of “Zue”. But it’s proven to be great advice on one of life’s most important decisions, and I’m grateful to have a partnership that’s founded on those principles.

My favorite memory of Mom and Baba is one that happened at a restaurant called Mi Casa in Los Cabos. It was a favorite dinner spot on our regular vacations there, in part because of the giant margaritas they served. Anyway, one night we were there and—after a few margaritas—Baba started complimenting Mom and saying how wonderful she was. Mi Casa also had this mariachi band that would walk around and go from table to table singing songs like “Feliz Navidad” and “Cielito Lindo” and it was a cheesy kind of fun background ambiance. But this night, Baba decided to pull them over and insisted that they “play a beautiful song for his beautiful wife.” I don’t even remember how Mom reacted, if she was eating it up or embarrassed by him, but I’ll never forget seeing just how in love he was, after all those years.