APIA-nionated — The Blue Tin

I picked up the blue tin, about eight inches in diameter. A red and gold insignia graces the top of the lid with promises of the precious cargo inside — the cookies emblazoned on the lid in their cozy crinkly white papers. I shook the tin, side to side, top to bottom. If I could discern the sound of the edges nestled against each other, I may have just been in luck.

My grandparents liked the K brand, Kjeldsen’s. They insisted this brand was the most delicious, the most buttery. All the better from the drugstore when there was a sale, a highlighter-orange sticker affixed to the side of the round.

I’ve heard how the sight of the blue tin reminds others not just of the cookies, but of what their loved ones stored within them. My grandparents loved the cookies so much I’m sure they wouldn’t have wanted to be fooled by that sort of deception — of quarters or sewing supplies instead of cookies.

Given they were Depression and World War II-era immigrants, though, my family, my ancestors, have been adept at keeping in other ways.

***

The round cookie

Hoarding became the zeitgeist in the earlier months of the pandemic, especially of long-storage paper goods from Costco.

There once was a box of Kleenex my grandparents had tucked away in the basement, the one trumpeted as the bicentennial edition.

I don’t understand how or why there was bicentennial Kleenex.

When we found it in the early 2000s, it would have been nearly thirty years old. I discovered the literal hard way that Kleenex (and I don’t want to even think of toilet paper) can go stale, like a rough slice of bread grating against the nose.

If my grandmother, who was still alive then, had been in her right mind in March 2020, she would have been so proud that so many started seeing the light.

***

The rectangle cookie

I know I’m not the first to say it, but the pandemic pantry — of long forgotten dried black beans, dense condensed soups, creamed corn, long grain rice, spaghetti noodles — is not new to an immigrant family. We were doing it this whole time, before it was cool or even necessary.

In thinking about hoarding, I deeply relate to the Ali Wong sketch. We saved because we didn’t know when we would have it next. So much of this scarcity mindset reflected for me in fried chicken:

The advice from the relative who suggested I grab a plate of KFC fried chicken at the family reunion or there wouldn’t be anything left; how my grandma hid the coveted freshly fried chicken on old meat Styrofoam “plates” in the grease splattered kitchen cupboards; the ageless Banquet fried chicken meal eaten by no one but the frostbite at the back of the freezer.

I still haven’t yet embarked on a KonMari or Swedish death cleaning. (To give myself grace and permission, Marie Kondo recently reeled back her previous stance on cleaning.) I don’t think hoarding is genetic, but my hands are not clean here.

***

The may have chocolate or raisins cookie

When we moved, our new house got broken into within weeks, right before Christmas.

I’m sure I disappointed the thieves.

Upon arriving at the place we had yet to call home, closet and cabinet doors were flung open like a hurricane had hit. The apple crates I had repurposed for moving boxes emptied upside down and sideways. All the greeting cards anyone had sent to me rummaged through in haste, because the thieves were thumbing for money, jewelry, and electronics.

I keep old theater tickets, colorful stickers, scraps of paper with words and images. As a writer, as a creative, I think this will all be useful, for an art project, someday.

I promise I am not that interesting. Besides, as a writer, as a creative, there isn’t money to steal.

Being the documentarian generation, I took photos of the wreckage, of the way my mementos created a scattered yet purposeful topography on the floor of our new home. Strangely, being exposed by strangers in a violating and vulnerable way forced me to see what I kept in a different light.

***

The swirl cookie

The year I turned 31, I had the privilege of visiting both of my paternal grandparents’ villages in Southern China. No insect repellant was effective enough to defend from the mosquitos, vampires of the summer humidity, sucking away at my thin American flesh.

At my grandfather’s ancestral home, the roof had caved in to its core. The raw noon sun sifted into the home. The only signs of life here now were the seedlings of green sprouted on these exposed wall surfaces — and the colony of bats I did not try to find.

I know very little about my grandfather, except that he was a paper son. Except that he was imprisoned, for an unknown amount of time, for tripping up in his interrogation on Angel Island in 1930. Except that he consoled himself, in telling my mother when I was born, that he hoped her next child would be a son.

While I found little trace materially of my family’s life there, I longed more for the intangible — the stories I wish I knew.

***

The pretzel cookie

As an immigrant descendant, all I know is about holding on to everything with clenched fists. We hoard because of what we don’t know, of when we’ll next have it or not. Likewise, we hoard our stories, our emotions, because it keeps us safe.

Between the silences, between the material tangible stuff, we don’t talk about hoarding, its roots in trauma, and the mental health side of it.

The scarcity mindset we live under is ultimately rooted in fear. Fear keeps us read, internally and externally, as one-dimensional. Fear is what keeps us invisible as a community, unable to ask for help, to break free.

We keep fear but fear is what ultimately keeps us.

I think about this fear in relation to the recent violence against Asians, how a family member claimed that to talk about the racist history would only encourage and exacerbate future attacks. This silence itself is part of the violence — against and within the Asian community since the start of COVID, since Atlanta in 2021, and now Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay.

In recognizing the ways I keep, I wonder if:

To hold onto these material and emotional things is a shitty way of practicing abundance; to come to this country, to buy on credit and on time that was never yours to begin with, is it not just late capitalism; to give your junk to the next generation — even in the semblance of gifting — is to pass on the burden?

***

My husband scored a tin of the cookies from the holiday work party. It’s not THE brand, and it’s not even the iconic blue tin. Because it’s Christmas, it’s a festive, shiny forest-green tin adorned with a scene of snow, a cozy home in the woods, and a leaping reindeer. Instead of a randomly stickered drug store price tag, snowflakes scattered in their crystalline patterns flurry the sides.

Using my fingernails, I pry the catch of the tape and peel it back from the round, breaking the seal and freeing the lid from the base. Inside, the cookies are a bland, pale blonde — hardly buttery — as if evading the Central Valley sun all summer long.

My husband admits he doesn’t really like them anyway. We struggle to finish the cookies as I write this, but crumbs of the cookies are bait to coax my toddler son to say his first words. Is it wasteful to even think, can I dare compost the inferior tasting cookies?

If I keep the tin, what will go into it? Maybe I don’t have to keep it at all.

Maybe I get to decide, as an immigrant descendant, as a writer. I can choose what memories and stories I keep, and what no longer serves me, and what does. The tin acts as a constraint for me. What stories do not fit, what narratives no longer serve me anymore, can and must go.

And I forge my own history.

This piece is published in a series responding to APIA-nionated’s Spring call for pitches: personal essays that share your experience unravelling a loose thread of your personal history with objects — a rabbit hole down your mother’s letters, heirlooms lost and found, documenting activism through protest signs, etc.