Happy Birthday or Whatever: Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family Disasters - Softcover

Choi, Annie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061132225 ISBN 13: 9780061132223

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2007

Synopsis

“Mining the age-old tensions between mothers and daughters, Choi’s strong debut is an uproariously funny memoir of growing up with her Korean American family in Los Angeles.... [T]hese are indelible, poignant, and often riotously funny scenes of a daughter’s frustrations and indestructible love.” — Booklist

A humorous story about the relationship between a first generation Korean-American and her parents, an alternately funny and poignant narrative showing how it feels to have one foot firmly planted on each side of the Pacific Ocean.

Annie Choi’s very Korean mother never stopped annoying her thoroughly Americanized daughter. Growing up near Los Angeles, Annie was continually exasperated by both her mother’s typical Korean harangues—you must get all As and attend Harvard—and non-so-typical eccentricities: stuffing the house with tacky Pope paraphernalia.

But when Annie’s mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, the uneasy relationship between mother and daughter changes. Choi’s witty and accessible prose will appeal to any daughter of immigrants, and to anyone who’s had a challenging relationship with their mother.

About this title

About the Author

Annie Choi was born and raised in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, she lives in New York City.

From the Back Cover

Meet Annie Choi. She fears cable cars and refuses to eat anything that casts a shadow. Her brother thinks chicken is a vegetable. Her father occasionally starts fires at work. Her mother collects Jesus trading cards and wears plaid like it's a job. No matter how hard Annie and her family try to understand one another, they often come up hilariously short.

But in the midst of a family crisis, Annie comes to realize that the only way to survive one another is to stick together . . . as difficult as that might be. Annie Choi's Happy Birthday or Whatever is a sidesplitting, eye-opening, and transcendent tale of coping with an infuriating, demanding, but ultimately loving Korean family.

Reviews

Choi's volatile relationship with her domineering, chronically dissatisfied mother is at the heart of this memoir, a funny and often moving account of growing up in a family of Korean immigrants. The parent/child compact in Choi's childhood home was as follows: Mommy and Daddy's job is to take care of the child; the child's job is to study hard, go to Harvard and become a doctor. But Choi and her mother face each other across a seemingly unbridgeable divide: Annie has little desire to embody traditional Korean feminine virtues (and no desire to be a doctor); her mother—to whom social status is everything—cannot countenance her daughter's "shortcomings." Whether recounting the shame of bringing home a B-plus on a fourth-grade spelling test (a clear indicator that she's destined for an inferior institution) or the greater horror of having to wear Korean clothes to American school ("The fun of soup bring Spring" reads one pair of her tracksuit bottoms), Choi adds acid wit—mixed with compassion—to her descriptions of immigrant life in the San Fernando Valley. This is that rare book that delivers more than it promises; Choi tackles the theme of mother/daughter conflict with grace and humor. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mining the age-old tensions between mothers and daughters, Choi's strong debut is an uproariously funny memoir of growing up with her Korean American family in Los Angeles. Many stories expose the specific struggles of children of immigrants. When she entered kindergarten, for example, Choi was placed in a remedial learning program because her school didn't have an ESL specialist. Other stories focus on familiar mother-daughter battlegrounds (when her mother asks her to wear an ensemble that Choi describes as "appropriate for Paul Revere's stable boy," she writes, "I felt she had stopped loving me") and on the universal adolescent feelings of a self-described "late bloomer": "Anyone could confuse my back for my chest." From the elementary-school memories of her mother's tough-love academic views--"Don't be baby! You not wear diaper no more. You have to practice so you get A"--to the phone exchanges when college-age Choi learns of her mother's breast cancer, these are indelible, poignant, and often riotously funny scenes of a daughter's frustrations and indestructible love. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Happy Birthday or Whatever

Track Suits, Kim Chee, and Other Family DisastersBy Annie Choi

Harper Paperbacks

Copyright © 2007 Annie Choi
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-113222-3

Chapter One

Happy Birthday or Whatever

I was going to have the best birthday ever. It would start with a parade-a dizzying spectacle of floats, prancing palominos, and the country's loudest marching bands. There would be troupes of mimes and contortionists, foul-mouthed drag queens, and a man juggling little girls on fire. Monkeys dressed in powder blue tuxedos would throw candy and tiny bottles of whiskey to the hordes of my fans lined up along Sixth Avenue. A dozen Michael Jackson impersonators, from his pre-op "Rock with You" days to his current noseless incarnation, would handle the sixty-foot helium balloon version of me. As the Grand Marshal, I would ride on the back of an elephant and wave as streamers, confetti, and twenty-dollar bills cascaded over me. After the procession, my friends and I would drink all the liquor in Manhattan, break tequila bottles over our heads, and pick fights with the Hell's Angels. The next morning we would crawl into work at the crack of noon, nursing hangovers and picking glass out of last night's clothes, and proclaim that the only birthday that could've been more historic was Jesus' bar mitzvah.

The morning of my twenty-seventh birthday, I received several e-mails from friends sheepishly bowing out of dinner, bar-hopping, and whatever mischief the night might bring. "No problem," I replied, "more liquor for the rest of us." Later, two more friends cancelled: "But maybe we'll make it-call us later tonight." No matter, I thought, the rest of us can still level every bar in the city. Then another friend explained he was "just too tired." I called him a geriatric and crossed him off my list. Seeing the members of my posse dwindle, I called my remaining friends to confirm our night of debauchery. One got a last-minute ticket to something that wouldn't be as exciting as my birthday-Madonna and her fake British accent in concert-and the other didn't return my calls. A half-hour before party time, other friends decided that meeting deadlines outweighed meeting Jose Cuervo. What would have been a highly intemperate party with twelve of my closest friends ended up being a quiet group of four (myself included) dining at a restaurant where tables were set with too many forks. We split a bottle of wine and ate outside. It was humid. Our waiter scraped breadcrumbs off the tablecloth with a little metal scoop, and the butter, which was sculpted into a tiny rose, sweated in the August evening heat. I turned twenty-seven with no monkeys or transvestites or celebrity impersonators. And no phone calls from my parents.

The next morning I woke up and checked my messages. Perhaps my parents called in the middle of the night; they live in Los Angeles and the three-hour time difference worked in their favor. Nothing. I was surprised; my parents use the phone as a 3,000-mile-long umbilical cord, and most of the time I want to strangle myself with it. My mother calls just to inform me that rice is on sale at Ralph's, but it's still cheaper to buy it at a Korean grocery store and how much is rice in New York and why do Americans eat Uncle Ben's, when he's not even Asian (one of the many things about Americans that still confuse my mother even though she and my father immigrated in 1971). On the one day that my parents were supposed to call, they didn't. Even my brother, the guy who used to wrestle me to the ground and fart in my face, remembered. Mike sent me a characteristically terse e-mail: "Happy birthday or whatever." My brother, in addition to being a master wordsmith, keeps untraditional hours. He spends his days sleeping and his nights processing loans for a major bank. But even he managed to send his little sister a birthday greeting.

I checked the missed-calls list on my cell phone. Nothing. What kind of parents forget their child's birthday? Bad ones. Unloving ones. Ones that don't deserve the World's Greatest Kid. (I have the mug to prove it; I stole it from my brother.) My birthday should be easy to remember-August 25th, the day before their wedding anniversary.

I toyed with the idea of not calling my parents on their anniversary and playing out a childish drama, but I realized that my parents never made a big deal about their anniversary. They've always appreciated my phone call and greetings, but I don't think they expected it. When I was growing up, August 26th was just another day. But on August 25th, I was the center of everyone's universe, and the Anniverse included a stuffed animal, my favorite meal (spaghetti or tofu stew), and an ice cream cake from Baskin-Robbins (Jamoca Almond Fudge). I flipped open my phone. At the very least, I could make my parents feel guilty. That could be fun. I dialed my mother first.

"Hello?"

"Hi, it's me. How are you?"

"Who this?"

I thought that evolution and genetics allowed parents to easily identify the voices of their offspring. This is why wolves can identify their pups by their whines and barks from miles away. My mother apparently opted out of that gene. Instead she got the one that suddenly made her forget the date she squeezed out a squirming eight-pound ball of flesh after spending nine months with an indomitable case of hemorrhoids, which she has always made a point of mentioning to me.

"This is your daughter."

"Anne?"

"Is there another?"

"Hi, Anne! You sound funny."

"Maybe a little older? More mature?"

"No. How you are?"

"I'm good. I'm calling to say happy anniversary."

Silence. I heard scratchy Korean AM radio playing in her car-a commercial for the new, faster Hyundai Sonata. The last time my mother was this quiet it was 1982, and she was heavily sedated after three root canals. She shuffled around the house slowly and groaned, just like a zombie, only with more drool.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Happy Birthday or Whateverby Annie Choi Copyright © 2007 by Annie Choi. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061132225
• ISBN 13: 9780061132223
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256