I was heading out the door around 3PM, Saturday December 22nd. It's the day after my brother's graduation (coincidentally my best friend/3rd cousin Angela, and my boyfriend's graduation, as well), and I had a relatively quiet evening at home.
Andrew's graduation was fairly low-key. It's a winter graduation, nonetheless, and though I never really knew SJSU to be a college campus to be known in the area of Health Sciences, it seems he was in good hands, all along. I met with his dean (also, a professor in several of his courses), who had mentored him throughout most of his stay at the college. She had nothing but good things to say about him, and it seems he is on a clear path to success, after much soul-searching, he's found his calling. In Dean Roe's words, "I mean, who wants to hang out with a middle-aged woman?"
And so the night ended with a 10 course meal at Mayflower Seafood Restaurant in Milpitas, with about 20 guests, half - family, and half - his friends. The bill total: 762, exactly. One expensive, expensive meal, that my mother deemed entirely worth the $$.
Saturday morning, I ran around and did a little bit of Christmas shopping, but I've never been especially good at shopping for gifts, mostly because I can never decided on anything unique to give to people, and usually end up with a generic giftcard, for fear of getting people things they neither want, or need, but are too afraid to say otherwise. I think I've played safe for the most part. I think next year, I'll go a bit farther out on the extremes...! I was heading back to Sephora, and I was in the parking lot, when I realized it was already 3:30PM! I wasn't exactly sure what time diner would be, but! considering it was the weekend before Christmas, I assumed all sorts of madness trying to go home for the holidays. So instead of parking, went back out the front, and paid $0. parking, and got on the freeway. Let me say, thank goodness I left when I did, because I was in traffic for a good 2-3 hours, mostly stop and go traffic. I made it into Sacramento with enough time to stop in at the malls, and headed out to Florin to meet my boyfriend. He, of course, was neither dressed or near ready to leave the house.
10 minutes later, he was driving my car down a long stretch of dark road. And several minutes after that, we were there. I wasn't meeting the family at home, in Stockton. I was meeting them in Sacramento at a restaurant pre-determined. It wasn't until we were walking towards the restaurant that I voiced my fear, "is this a surprise dinner? And they don't know they're meeting me?" To this his only response was, "I didn't tell them specifically, but I think they know." I had left my greeting gifts in the car, especially since my first meeting would be at a restaurant, but as the time came, my dearest walked out with my keys, only to return some seconds later, "Hey Angela, could you come out for a second?". In the back of my mind, I realized that I would greeting his parents in the cold, yet I still had a lightness of heart. Sure enough, as I turned to face him, I see his parents standing by the door, as though they were about to walk into the restaurant. I had been fooled to think that they looked as old as my own parents, having married at a much later time than most other couples, my mom was 30.
His parents looked a bit younger. His dad's hands- rough from work, with slits of black having settled between the cracks of his toughened hands. His mom adorned a festive white-pastel colored jacket over an equally festive shirt, topped with a very short, lace-like scarf (if you can even call it that). I had imagined a couple much like my parents, and semi-mirroring my boyfriend's own physique, something that would suggest "I'm their child", but this was not the case, at all. They were much smaller in frame, in contrast to his 6'1, medium build figure.
Dinner went well, with occasional silences, where my dearest failed to fill in the gaps, instead focusing all, or most of his attention to the Chinese version of Dancing with the Stars. So his parents would quiz me on various interests of mine, and were bold enough to immediately ask, upon his brief leave of absence from the dining table, his dad jumped on the opportunity to ask how we had met. I told them the gist of how we met, leaving out the details of our 6 odd month courting, and they seemed satisfied with how coincidentally we had met, and how lucky we were to have found something that stuck. All of this was said just as he returned to the table.
Throughout the night, surprisingly, I spoke with relative ease in somewhat fluent Cantonese, and all the more surprising is how my fluent-ness contradicts one of his earliest statements, in which he coupled with extreme laughter, "Your cantonese is worse than mine". This, at the time, was especially disconcerting, considering I had spent a good part of my teen years studying Cantonese, and graduated my junior year in High School from what the Chinese would consider elementary school.
The night ended well, we presumed, his mom while saying goodbye exclaimed the usual it was good to meet you, and both re-iterated that I should go to visit them in Stockton, but most notable was his mom's open embrace, something that no one expected, me, least of all.
Hopefully the food bodes well with them, and I'm in the clearing, at least for now.
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