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By Yuxi Lin | Originally published by Longreads, June 2022 | Reading time: approximately 12 minutes (3,311 words)
It was 2004, my inaugural year in America. I remember distinctly typing “wholesale” into my nascent digital translator.
noun
definition: the sale of goods in large quantities for retail by others.
At twelve years old, my deepest yearning was to feel complete, to be wholesome. The very notion of purchasing this state of being held an undeniable allure.
Before me stood a glass display, a gleaming cabinet showcasing the pinnacle of luxury as I understood it then. Watches, earrings, necklaces—all slumbering under the smudges of countless curious fingers. In my young mind, nothing could eclipse the extravagance of a Costco diamond. During an ESL class, prompted by my teacher’s question about dream proposals, I confidently declared my vision: my future husband would escort me to Costco. There, I’d request the salesperson to unlock the case, revealing the $1999 ring. Following this grand gesture, we would celebrate at a nearby Pizza Hut, my culinary haven, where he would kneel on the faux-wood tiles and ask for my hand.
While my parents and their friends navigated the towering aisles of bulk goods, I discreetly patrolled the sample stations. These were rare opportunities to savor American cuisine, as my parents, driven by a blend of apprehension and disapproval, avoided American restaurants. For a brief period during lunchtime at school, I shamefully discarded the homemade fried rice my mother prepared, succumbing to the taunts of white classmates who deemed it “funny-looking.” However, my meager allowance quickly dwindled, halting my chicken nugget purchases.
My focus became laser-sharp on the elderly women in hairnets, the dispensers of bite-sized Hot Pockets and solitary nachos drizzled with salsa. My ultimate desire, though, centered on the microwavable, cheese-laden pierogies. “Trash food,” my mother would dismissively label them. Secretly, I confessed to myself, I aspired to be a trash can, capable of consuming without judgment or limit.
Almost invariably, these precious samples arrived in grease-stained cupcake liners. I would meticulously fold them in half, then quarters, concealing them in my palm before surreptitiously returning for another taste. I was careful not to appear overly eager, too needy – a sentiment familiar to many immigrants, a hunger for something intangible, persisting regardless of their years in a new land. Yet, I often found myself returning for thirds, sometimes even fourths, unable to resist. The aproned sample ladies occasionally cast knowing glances, but they never intervened, a silent grace for which I remain eternally grateful.
My parents, in Costco’s expansive aisles, displayed a rare contentment, a satisfaction I usually only witnessed during their trips back to China. Their coworker sometimes joined our Costco excursions, stocking up on massive 15-pound sacks of flour to craft mantous and noodles—economical staples replacing rice. After dropping him off, my mother would often remark on his frugality, laced with a hint of condescension.
“These northerners,” she’d pronounce from the passenger seat, “they simply don’t understand how to appreciate seafood like we do.”
My father would concur. “We should invite them over soon and show them a real seafood feast.”
“They’ll be talking about it for weeks!” my mother would add, anticipating the social cachet.
“Or maybe,” I interjected, “maybe he just really likes mantous and noodles?”
My mother would swiftly turn, casting a disapproving look. “Because that’s food for poor people. We are different.” Her words hung in the car, a stark declaration of our perceived social mobility in America.
The year 2005 marked Keira Knightley’s portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, quickly becoming my cinematic obsession. I was captivated by the Bennet sisters’ lamentations of poverty, delivered amidst the comforts of a household staffed with five servants. When my Korean American friend, Stephanie, mentioned owning the DVD, disbelief washed over me. I had seen the price tag at Costco—$25.99—and instinctively multiplied it by eight, the approximate USD to RMB exchange rate. In China, that sum could have covered a week’s worth of dining out. Owning such a luxury at thirteen seemed unfathomable. How could she afford it, even with a white father?
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“Want to borrow it?” Stephanie offered casually.
“Sure, if you can bring it to school,” I replied, still grappling with the notion of its accessibility.
The next day, she placed the DVD in my hand. “You’re so funny,” she said, a puzzled expression mirroring my lingering surprise. “Why didn’t you believe I had it?”
I ran a finger over the smooth plastic case, tracing Keira Knightley’s profile, half-turned away, and simply shrugged, wishing I could vanish. The cultural chasm felt vast and unbridgeable.
Once a year, Costco transformed into a haven of unexpected beauty. Near the entrance, pianos appeared—Kawai and Roland uprights, so pristine and elegant they inspired a hesitant reverence. They evoked a poignant nostalgia for the piano I had left behind in China, the bench stained with tears of exhaustion from countless hours of practice, scales and arpeggios drilled until my fingers moved independently of conscious thought. Sitting at a Costco piano, a dormant part of myself would awaken. Awkwardly at first, then with increasing fluency, my fingers would rediscover a forgotten language. I knew these moments were fleeting, limited to a song or two before a sales representative would inquire about my parents’ whereabouts.
The pianos remained for a week, perhaps two. Inevitably, on our next visit, they would be gone, the brief interlude of music replaced by the familiar landscape of bulk goods.
At fourteen, I purchased my first American CD. Britney Spears, bathed in silver light, posed in black leather shorts and a bra, a black fur hood framing her face like a halo. She was, undeniably, the epitome of beauty in my teenage eyes. My Prerogative, the cover proclaimed. I consulted my dictionary, understanding the phrase to mean something akin to “rights and privilege.” I caressed the glossy cover against my cheek, oblivious to my parents’ muttered complaints about the cost. I had strategically placed it in their Costco cart, refusing to relinquish it. Driving home, “Boys” filled the car, Britney’s whispered “Okay nasty” and Pharell’s breathy vocals creating an awkward silence in the front seats.
From first grade, the cardinal sin of wasting food was deeply ingrained. This message, pervasive in China, resonated both publicly and privately. One of the first sentences I learned to read in my Chinese textbook declared: “Every drop of a farmer’s sweat transforms into a pellet of rice in your bowl.” This was the sacred origin of my food, and leaving even a single grain uneaten was a profound disrespect to the farmers’ labor. This discipline was rigorously enforced within my family. My mother would remain at the table until every morsel of flesh was meticulously picked from a bone. Then, she would crack the bone to extract the marrow. Finally, the bone fragments would simmer into broth.
I don’t want to appear too greedy, too needy, the way immigrants feel starved for that unnamable thing, no matter how many years they live in their chosen country.
Whenever I voiced any aversion to a particular food, my father would invariably retort, “You are so lucky. Back when I was your age, I would have given anything for just a bite of that.” His words carried the weight of lived experience, and I believed him implicitly.
As an adult delving into nutrition research, I repeatedly encountered the China Study, conducted by the Campbells in the 1960s. The American scientists concluded that the lower incidence of heart disease among Chinese populations stemmed from their primarily plant-based diets, low in meat. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Many of these “lauded healthy Chinese eating habits” were, in reality, born out of necessity, a consequence of widespread scarcity.
Chinese culture is often described as food-obsessed, and this is undeniably true. However, it wasn’t until adulthood that I grasped the extent to which this obsession was rooted in intergenerational trauma. Witnessing the palpable deprivation etched on my parents’ faces as they ate even a simple piece of chicken, I couldn’t ignore the historical context. Who were they truly eating for? Perhaps for their younger selves, those perpetually hungry ghosts who could never be fully satiated. And then, a disquieting thought: did I mirror this same insatiable hunger when I ate?
After college, I found myself living alone in North Carolina, working a soul-crushing job that demanded four days of weekly travel to obscure corporate client sites. Earning more than my parents ever had, I primarily spent my income on clothes and high heels, material markers of a success I wasn’t sure I felt. Some days, seeking a strange comfort, I would drive to Costco and order a Coke and a slice of pizza. I’d eat alone, observing families with restless children scaling the benches, leaving greasy, ketchup-stained fingerprints in their wake. I’d call my parents, prompting their ritualistic questions about my purchases, the prices paid, and then I’d tell them I had eaten the same Costco pizza they had enjoyed on their own recent trip, a shared experience across miles and generations.
Two years later, having left corporate life for the fulfilling chaos of teaching English in Texas, I was unpacking groceries after a weekend trip when I realized my wallet was missing. Panic flared. Where had I last seen it?
I called the San Antonio Costco, and a calm Texan voice assured me my wallet had been found. I had dropped it in the parking lot, transferring groceries to my car. Upon retrieving it, I felt an overwhelming urge to hug the kind man in the red vest, a stranger who had unknowingly eased my anxieties.
Sometimes, in Texas, I still find myself drawn to Costco, a place where I project both my past and imagined futures onto the Asian families who populate its aisles. I observe sensible middle-aged Asian parents, methodically navigating the store, searching for Kirkland brand treasures destined for relatives back home – vitamins, salted walnuts, anti-aging creams. Like my parents, they seek out the most affordable items bearing the “Made in the USA” label, tangible proof of their American success, justifying, perhaps, their geographic displacement. I weave narratives around them in my mind. Did they, like my family once did, arrive in a convoy of Toyotas each Sunday, Asian neighbors converging in the Costco parking lot? Did they buy in bulk the favorite foods of their adult children, freezing them in anticipation of infrequent homecomings? Did they, too, find a strange sense of security within these warehouse walls, a feeling of belonging in the land of bulk buys?
My favorite subjects to observe are the young Asian couples, pushing carts overflowing with toilet paper and granola bars, heads bent in quiet concentration, performing mental gymnastics with cost-per-unit comparisons. They are engrossed in the comforting rhythms of domesticity, building a life together in this new land. In a stroller nestled beside them, a baby sucks his thumb, wide-eyed, observing the towering landscape of consumer goods.
My parents were born in 1962, at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Chinese Famine. The fields lay desolate, barren. Every edible shoot had been uprooted, trees stripped bare of their bark. Caused by a confluence of natural disasters and disastrous agricultural policies, the famine claimed an estimated 35 million lives, a number unknown to my parents then, unknown to most. Only whispers circulated – bodies in village streets, vanishing without a trace. Silence shrouded the unspeakable.
One of the first sentences I learn to read in my Chinese textbook is that every drop of a farmer’s sweat turns into a pellet of rice in my bowl.
Food scarcity and pervasive poverty continued to cast a long shadow over China for decades. In a faded photograph from that era, my young father and his college friends are startlingly thin, ribs visible beneath their skin.
Growing up, my father subsisted on rice porridge, and, as the youngest of six, occasionally received a desiccated olive, a coveted treat he’d savor slowly while his older sisters watched with undisguised envy. This meager offering defined “favorite son,” defined “son” itself. He’d nurse that single olive throughout an entire meal, it being the sole dish. When guests arrived, his parents would boil a precious egg, offering it to the virtual stranger or unwelcome neighbor while their own children observed from the doorway, imagining the richness of the yolk, the soft crumble of the white.
Like almost every family in China at the time, my family couldn’t procure enough food, regardless of wealth. Yet, my grandmother, shaped by famine’s enduring trauma, hoarded gold for the rest of her life, a tangible security against future scarcity. Her final gift to me, presented at her 94th birthday banquet, was a single gold earring, removed from her left earlobe. She mumbled something in her toothless regional dialect, unintelligible to me. My aunt translated, “She says, for your dowry.” My grandmother nodded emphatically, pressed the earring into my palm, and closed my fingers around it, a silent blessing, a legacy of survival.
During the famine, overwhelmed by the impossibility of feeding six children, my grandparents sent my third aunt, my father’s older sister, to the countryside, to be raised by distant relatives. She would somehow survive there, they reasoned, a desperate gamble. But conditions outside the city were even more dire. Along with other starving farmers, my aunt scavenged wild grasses and weeds from the parched earth, boiling them into a meager sustenance. Years later, when she finally returned to the family, there was no welcome, no acknowledgment of her ordeal.
“Why is Third Aunt so fat?” I asked my father, a child’s blunt question in elementary school.
“She’s not really fat,” he’d deflect.
“So, does she eat a lot?” I persisted.
“It has nothing to do with eating,” he’d say, ending the conversation.
My aunt lived the rest of her life with a perpetually bloated face, her body swollen from the toxins of the wild plants she had consumed in her youth. Every year, she would sew me pajama pants in the most garish fabrics, always with elastic waistbands, a practical, if aesthetically questionable, gesture of love. And every night, I still slept under the duvet covers she had made for me. She worked at a crematorium, a job that granted her connections, connections she used to secure favorable burial plots for our family. In her early sixties, pancreatic cancer was diagnosed, a truth concealed from her, allowing her to die in peaceful ignorance. Within six weeks, she was gone.
Whenever I mention to my parents my desire to write about them, they invariably respond, “Why? Our lives are so ordinary. There are a billion of us, nothing worth telling.” Perhaps, on some level, they are right. Human suffering, in its myriad forms, is hardly a revelation. Yet, sometimes, sitting down to a meal, I feel a profound emptiness within, as if I am merely a vessel, a mouth for generations of mouths, eating on behalf of my parents, my aunts, my uncles, my ancestors. And I imagine others, those untroubled by these ancestral ghosts, observing my insatiable appetite with a mixture of bewilderment and horror.
After a decade in the Northeast, my parents relocated to a town in Florida, embarking on a new venture: cultivating the swampy land behind their house. The soil, sandy and nutrient-poor, presented a challenge. Each month, they made a two-hour round trip to a horse farm, collecting manure to enrich the earth. They solicited discarded Kikkoman soy sauce buckets from the local Asian grocery store, repurposing them as planters for radishes and carrots. My father, with newfound carpentry skills, fashioned trellises from wooden planks to support cucumber vines, snow peas, winter squashes, and bitter melons. Their efforts yielded an astonishing harvest, so abundant they invested in a $3000 industrial freezer for storage. It still strikes me as surreal, seeing their petite Asian figures standing beside this massive appliance, a freezer twice their combined size, a symbol of their hard-won abundance.
Despite their newfound ability to grow or purchase most vegetables, Costco remained a steadfast habit, a ritual driven more by ingrained routine than necessity. They would drive two hours to Orlando and back, finding satisfaction in navigating the familiar aisles, loading and unloading the car, the physical labor itself a comforting echo of past struggles. My father consistently bought more than they could possibly consume, prompting my mother’s anxious calculations about expiration dates, strategic meal planning to prevent waste. Yet, sometimes, they would return with just a jug of milk and some fruit, items readily available at the local grocery store, a mere five minutes away.
En route to a family trip to Miami, meticulously planned and booked by me, we passed a Costco. My mother voiced her desire to stop.
“Now? We’re trying to reach the hotel before rush hour,” I protested, irritation creeping into my voice. “Is there something specific you need?”
“No, but I just want to go in,” she insisted, her gaze fixed on the warehouse looming in the distance. “Maybe pick up a few groceries.”
“Mom, we’re staying at the Hyatt Regency,” I reminded her, exasperated. “There’s nowhere for you to cook.” I had firmly forbidden the electric stove they typically brought on road trips, a portable kitchen for Motel 8 parking lot feasts of Chinese food. This time, I was determined to experience a truly “American” vacation. I pressed down harder on the accelerator.
“Well, maybe I’ll just look…” My mother’s voice trailed off, the warehouse receding into the distance as quickly as it had appeared.
One evening, an unexpected video call from my father illuminated my phone screen. His question was surprisingly specific: “How does one eat jamón?”
“Jamón? Where are you getting jamón in Florida?” I asked, bewildered.
“Costco.” He panned the camera, revealing a whole, bone-in jamón resting on their living room floor.
“Are you having guests over?” I inquired, still confused.
“No. Just for your mom and me.”
My parents had never been to Spain, had never expressed any affinity for Spanish cuisine. In fact, the one time I had taken them to a Spanish restaurant, they had critiqued the seafood paella, lamenting how much better it would have tasted if prepared as Chinese fried rice. Their commentary on the flamenco dancers was even less complimentary.
Sometimes I go to Costco in Texas just to see other Asians, where I project my past and future onto the families there.
Staring at the enormous cured ham leg on my screen, I was momentarily speechless.
My father refocused the camera on himself. “I thought I’d ask you since you went to Spain,” he explained, as if it were the most logical thing in the world.
“I’ve only ever had jamón sliced at restaurants,” I admitted.
“Well, what’s the point of traveling all the way to Spain when you can get perfectly good jamón right here from Costco?” he declared, a statement that defied logic yet somehow made perfect sense in his Costco-centric worldview.
“Is this… about me going to Spain a few months ago instead of visiting you and Mom in Florida?” I ventured, sensing a deeper, unspoken layer to the jamón inquiry.
“No. Don’t be immature,” he dismissed, yet the silence that followed was heavy with unspoken emotions.
“Want us to save some jamón for you in the freezer?” he offered, a peace offering in cured ham. “You can try it when you come back.”
“Okay,” I agreed, hanging up the call, a wave of uncertainty washing over me. What would defrosted jamón taste like? And what was the unspoken conversation hidden beneath the surface of this Costco purchase?
Over the years, amidst our ongoing clashes regarding my increasing “Americanness,” food had become the sole safe territory, a neutral ground between my parents and me. It was also, I realized, the primary language through which they expressed love. While my white friends received care packages of cookies and candles from home, my parents offered to overnight me live lobsters, bulk-ordered, of course.
Pushing a cart through the sprawling aisles of the Orlando Costco, my father would load up boxes of oranges and blueberries, attempting to “force-feed” me over the next few days, his gestures of love often bordering on overwhelming. I did my best to feign gratitude, understanding that the recipients of this abundance were not just me, but the ghosts of hunger he carried within.
“I never had this growing up,” he’d say, his voice thick with emotion, as he’d add yet another five-pound box of fruit to the overflowing cart, ignoring my mother’s disapproving frown. It was a carefully choreographed act, perfected over years, a silent dialogue of love and loss expressed through the language of bulk goods.
Looking up at the stadium-bright lights illuminating the vast warehouse, I understood. In the great halls of Costco, two of our deepest fears were momentarily assuaged: the fear of not having enough, and the equally profound fear of not being enough.
Ten miles away, children lined up at the gates of Orlando’s Disney World, eagerly awaiting the realization of their dreams. Here, in the fluorescent glow of Kirkland, my parents stood in line to check out, their version of the American dream realized within these bulk-buy aisles. Here, in this warehouse of abundance, I felt, paradoxically, most American. Here was a home where I could touch, taste, and consume a piece of the elusive promise of “more” that permeated the American ethos. As we walked out the automatic doors, a white woman smiled and waved, “Please come back soon.” It was an invitation, a welcome, a subtle affirmation of belonging in this land of plenty.
Yuxi Lin is a poet and writer currently living and teaching in New York City.
Edited by Carolyn Wells
Copyedited by Krista Stevens
