This is going to be a multi-part series of personal reflections on my life experiences and interactions with having mainland Chinese in-laws and the cultural clashes that have ensued. Part I was about the MIL. Part II continues where Part I left off, moving on to the father-in-law.

It’s not so much that there is a language barrier between the father-in-law (FIL) and me, because he’s still speaking Mandarin. It’s just that he has this thick provincial northern Chinese accent when he speaks. Like someone who speaks Cajun Vernacular English really fast and is using a different register of vocabulary. The average English speaker will get the gist of the conversation, but you’re not understanding every single word. Also, it’s the socio-cultural difference that’s the barrier, not unlike the Appalachian coal miner trying to get on the same ideological page as a Yankee hipster. Compound that with the generational gap and now we’re in the right ballpark of what’s happening here.

For instance, one summer I drove home from work, pulled in to my driveway, and here is what I saw: spread across the lawn for everyone on our street to see, hanging off tree branches in the front yard, and draped over the boulders of our rock garden were dozens of cut up men’s underwear and old towels, many of them with permanent stains. FIL had decided to transform these old items that could no longer serve their original intended uses and upcycle them into dish rags, which he bleached and is now sun-drying.

To keep wild animals from eating our fruits, he once wrapped each fruit with a plastic grocery bag so that when I looked outside my window in the morning to try and enjoy the view, I’d be met with a landscape of billowing grocery bags hanging from the trees, the Safeway and Ranch 99 logos fully visible. I had to ask J to talk to the FIL about that one, not from an aesthetic perspective (though certainly there is that), but also from a health perspective. Those plastic bags are getting heated up under the hot California summer sun with our fruits absorbing who knows what sorts of chemicals. It defeats the whole purpose of having been organic.

I’m the type who wants our landscaping to look like a page out of Town & Country. The FIL’s idea of landscaping consists of plastic crates we would have otherwise tossed but he fought to keep, cleaned out paint buckets, and mangled furniture pieces our neighbors have cast to the side of the street that he’s picked up and brought home because he sees their value.

I’d like the dining room décor to be evocative of a Mediterranean villa. His idea of interior design is to make sure there’s just enough walking space to maneuver around the clutter of everything he’s hoarding, stuff saved for a rainy day.

When there is only one family room that both need to share occupancy and each has their own strong idea on how it should be, and that idea is in direct opposition with the other’s idea, both convinced that they are the one with the right to rule, what do you do? Guess if you can solve that, world peace would be in the bag.

FIL is a hoarder. That means any space in the house he occupies is strewn with dilapidated cardboard boxes and retired suitcases piled high full of 30-year-old linens so old they’re sewn over with patches, frayed and torn coats, empty cans, glass containers, carefully folded paper wrappings from gifts, and expired medical supplies. Bottles, tin boxes, plastic coffee canisters, clothes he hasn’t worn in four decades, broken clocks, chipped dishware no one will ever use again so I’m not sure why we’re keeping them around, and a heaping stash of old, frayed towels. He can’t and won’t throw anything away.

Because of his hoarding, there are rooms in my house I haven’t stepped foot in in three years. There were a few times he left his door ajar and I peeked in. To my eyes, it looked like a landfill. Broken objects that should probably be tossed, chaotic clutter, bulging suitcases stacked on top of one another, and, peculiarly, a suitcase resting permanently on the side of the bed the MIL used to sleep on. Same with his bathroom—there’s a suitcase resting permanently on his bathroom counter. I have no idea why, and I’ve never looked inside.

His life experiences have caused him to be petrified of “running out” of good stuff. So, for instance, if we have dungenness crab for dinner, he won’t eat all of it in one sitting. He’ll save half of it in the fridge for the next two weeks to relish slowly. It doesn’t matter that the shell has turned black and the meat has spoiled. If we have steak, he’ll eat only half and save the rest to nibble on– for days, for a whole week.

I think foods should be enjoyed during their peak window of tastiness. He doesn’t. He’d rather eat spoiled beef but have beef in hand than eat it all right away and risk not having beef when he wants it. Which… isn’t ever going to happen. Because if he really did want beef the next week, we’d just go out and buy more beef.

FIL loves ice cream, so J will buy a box of ice cream bars for him. When he gets down to the last bar, he’ll leave it in the freezer untouched for months. Months. Because he’s afraid of “running out.” The only way to get FIL to finish that last ice cream bar is to buy a new box of ice cream bars and set it next to the old box. So our freezer always has to have two boxes of ice cream bars, two jars of his favorite condiment, two bags of chocolates. Resulting in more clutter. There’s no convincing the FIL that if he really wants more ice cream bars, more crab, or more steak, all we need to do is go buy more.

Some part of his brain will never accept that, in a manner of speaking, there is no “running out of” anything anymore. He hoards food in his den. Say we bought Snickers candy bars in January of 2021. I’ll enter the den in November of 2023 and find a stash of the Snickers bars we purchased nearly three years ago.

In paradoxical contrast, he refuses to eat root vegetables such as carrots and potatoes. The story goes that there was a period of his life during the famine when the only thing there was to eat, for months on end, were carrots and potatoes, and so those two vegetables in particular remind him of famine times. The whole point of coming to America was to never have to relive that again, goes his mindset, so why would he voluntarily seek out carrots and potatoes. Whereas those are two of my favorite vegetables.

FIL was born in a rural Shandong village during WWII at the tail end of the Sino-Japanese War, a war that left an indelible mark on every Asian from that period of time. On top of that, a Civil War was still raging across China between the Communists and the KMT (the post-1950s Taiwanese). Something specific and maybe to an extent universal among those born and raised during war gets imprinted deep into the psyche. Even in peacetime they’ve got a go-bag, ready to táo nàn 逃難, to flee from the calamity, to become a refugee.

On top of war there was famine. During FIL’s teenage years, one of the deadliest famines in human history took its toll. Villagers were eating tree bark and dirt to survive. The desperate resorted to human cannibalism. His own grandparents had gone through the earlier Northern Chinese Famine of the late 1800s. For the first decade of his life, all he knew was war, poverty, and hunger.

To escape starvation, he joined the People’s Liberation Army and was sent off to fight in various military campaigns. Meanwhile his parents died of starvation. He received word of their deaths months after it happened. When he finally could return to his hometown, there was no way to recover his parents’ bodies. He was never able to give them a proper burial. For the rest of his life, you wouldn’t be able to mention his parents (J’s paternal grandparents) without the FIL breaking into sobs and uncontrollable shaking. So no one knows much about them, because we’re not allowed to talk about them. The only thing I know about J’s grandmother is that she thought embroidered shoes were the penultimate of luxury, because when J and I got married, I saw her and she wanted to gift me a pair of red shoes (well a whole outfit, but she was particularly proud of the shoes). I asked FIL about it, and yeah, he did kinda get emotional like MIL warned he would, but he said yeah, that really sounds like her.

Before the army, the commune that FIL lived on had a one-room makeshift schoolhouse where all the kids, no matter what age, were rounded into that room to sit together for a few hours a day. FIL later told me that he didn’t fully master reading and writing until after joining the army, which he did by studying and memorizing Mao’s Little Red Book. It’s hard to identify an equivalent for level of education he reached. For convenience, when FIL is out of earshot, MIL and J would just tell people junior high. We can’t verify with the primary source because we’re not allowed to ask questions. His educational background is a highly sensitive topic for the FIL and he gets weird whenever it’s brought up.

Eventually the FIL ended up in Beijing as part of the security detail at Tiananmen Square. I don’t think any of us know exactly what he did during those years of active duty, other than he probably just did whatever the army assigned him to do. Early on in my relationship with J, the MIL had pulled me aside and told me not to bring up war and army stuff with the FIL, as it could lead to unpredictable and emotional outbursts.

It was during his time in Beijing that one of his army superiors, who knew the MIL’s father, thought that FIL and MIL might make a good pairing. There was no wedding, no celebration, hardly any dating even. They met. Neither party objected terribly. They got the official papers recognizing the marriage. There was a small dinner party. And that was that.

In 1960s communist China, someone with FIL’s background far outranked someone with MIL’s family background. To have lacked both money and education was to be a celebrated model communist, whereas to have either would have resulted in accusations of being a capitalist and having to wear the cangue, marched through the streets, forced to confess your sins of privilege. That was MIL’s family, forced to wear the cangue, and MIL’s father doing everything he could to integrate into the Communist Party to save his family. They handed over all generational family assets, all property, inheritances, everything you had to your name, and then you had to destroy all family books and records.

Once all personal assets were collected by the government, each family was given equal rations. You exchanged ration papers for food, cloth (for making your own clothes), and essentials. If you worked hard enough, you might be able to earn the luxury of possessing one or all of the four most prized items of their time: a bicycle, a sewing machine, a watch, and a Red Star radio.

While the MIL might have harbored resentment for such an egalitarian system, it was an extraordinary social change to someone like FIL. Equal food and commodity rations meant, in theory, that no one would ever go hungry or without shoes again. Also, the government would assign jobs to everyone, so no more worrying about employment security. There was no worrying about educational qualifications. Someone like FIL would have been revered for embodying model communist ideals. For the first time in his life, he was thriving.

When communism is operational, it means that no one goes hungry, no one is left unhoused, everyone has equal right to the same quality of education, and upon completion of schooling, everybody has job security. It means equal opportunity and parity for someone like FIL, but it also means exceptionalism is disincentivized. Communism in China meant that the people soon learned “not going hungry” is not quite the same as “being full.” For everyone to have food and shelter meant that no one was experiencing abundance, apart from the corrupted, unscrupulous few. It’s true that modern China is no longer a true communist state, because in its extreme and contrived push against capitalism, it boomeranged right back into it.

I wonder if FIL’s first recognition of the system’s flaws came when MIL was unable to produce enough milk for baby J and they had run out of ration coupons for baby formula. J would cry through the night out of hunger and the young couple had to feel the pain of not having enough to feed their infant. I know that story well because of the multiple times MIL has told it to me. She said nothing will break you like not having produced enough milk to feed your baby and running out of ration coupons for formula so all you could do was hold your baby while he cried.

MIL, after ten grueling years at a labor camp in the middle of nowhere for the crime of having been born into an affluent merchant class (read: capitalist) family, wanted out. The system afforded no accommodations for her disabilities and offered no opportunities for her scholarship to shine. So she immigrated to the US first, leaving FIL and J behind in Beijing. FIL didn’t want to leave China; he was having the time of his life. But ultimately MIL convinced him that the US would give their son better opportunities. For the sake of his son, he followed MIL to the US.

Once here, the status dynamics between MIL and FIL flipped on its head. MIL spoke enough broken English to get by, she was literate, she had a doctorate degree in biochemistry, and in the US, got hired as a lab tech at a university research facility. She became the main breadwinner.

Whereas FIL never ended up learning English and could only get menial assembly-line jobs in Chinatown. Their family struggled. J’s childhood memories consist of not being able to afford anything, having a hyper-acute awareness of money matters at a young age, calling banks, credit card companies, and immigration on his parents’ behalf, and a determination to get a job as soon as possible so he could start affording some of the things his peers had. When they first arrived, three families shared a single unit apartment by hanging up makeshift curtains to create walls. It wasn’t until J’s high school years that the family could finally afford to buy a single-family home, though they lived in it with J’s uncle (MIL’s brother) and his family, so it was occupied by two families.

Back when I was fresh out of law school, J and I rented this two-bedroom condo that I would refer to as “the shithole.” I had a student loan, so we decided it made more sense to throw the bigger chunk of our earnings into paying it off and until it was paid in full, we’d live frugally. When my parents visited us, I’d be embarrassed and apologize for the modesty of our place, assuring them it was temporary and we were going to start house-hunting soon enough. And yet when the in-laws visited, J’s father beamed ear to ear, so proud of his son. That this young couple could afford a two-bedroom condo without having to share it with roommates was a major marker of success to the FIL, whereas my father was all, “Don’t worry, this is temporary. Chin up. The humility is good for you; it builds character.”

After MIL’s condition worsened, she qualified for disability income insurance, which is what the FIL and MIL lived off of. By then J was out of the house and in college. FIL’s “job” became taking care of MIL, driving her to and from the dialysis center, to and from the hospital or doctor appointments, and handling most of the household chores. Yet there was a lot that FIL wasn’t capable of handling, so the whole time J and I were still dating, I swear the MIL called him three times a day. The horrifying (but hilarious) stories I could share of a young couple trying to be romantic and then the phone rings and J must pick up because it’s his mother and she could die if he doesn’t. Up until her last breath, J did the bulk of the work that FIL probably should have been doing for his wife.

Once when the in-laws were visiting, MIL’s wheelchair wouldn’t fit through the width of the door frame, so she got out of her chair and hobbled through the door, meanwhile barking commands at FIL to fold up the wheelchair, get it through the door, and open it up quickly so she wouldn’t have to stand for too long. He sighed, did as he was told, and turned to me to say, “I spent the first half of my life serving the army, and now I’m spending the second half of my life serving my wife.” MIL scowls and makes a face. “He never does anything for me.”

Observing those relationship dynamics meant that I had always felt more sympathy for him than MIL or even J, because J’s treatment of his father came across as obligatory filial piety. Where was the warmth? Where was the sincerity, the “I want to do this” instead of the “I have to do this.” With context, we start to see why.

We’ll start with his authoritarianism. The FIL treats everything as communal. And then on top of that, he’s controlling. MIL was the main breadwinner here in the US, but FIL controlled the finances with an iron grip. He forbade MIL and J from spending any of the money on “luxury items” and by luxury I literally mean a Micro Machines toy car or eating out at a sit-down restaurant for a birthday. I’m not even talking Michelin star restaurants that require reservations six months in advance; I mean like Applebee’s or Denny’s. He forbade MIL from “spoiling” their son, which is to say MIL wasn’t allowed to buy department store clothes or nice sneakers for J (apparently for schoolboys, sneakers are a super important status symbol). Everything J ever owned was a hand-me-down from another Chinese immigrant family whose kid outgrew it or heavily discounted off a clearance aisle.

For one glorious month J was allowed to take karate class. All students are supposed to buy and wear a dogi or gi (the white karate uniforms), but the uniform costed an extra $30, which FIL thought was absurd. He said no, absolutely not, J could not buy a single freakin’ outfit for $30 that he would only be wearing exclusively for one single activity. So at all the competitions, J would be the only kid wearing normal gym clothes and not in uniform. That sums up J’s experiences during his early years in the US. Oh, and karate was only for one month, because soon FIL complained the classes were way too expensive and unnecessary.

This other time, earlier in J’s childhood and back in China, J saw a wooden toy gun he really wanted. It costed one dollar (I’m saying “dollar” as a stand-in for whatever the actual currency unit would have been at the time). J begged and pleaded as little boys do, but FIL would not let his son get the toy. Instead, FIL used one dollar to buy rotten bananas for the family.

Meaning, you can’t spend money extraneously just for yourself; if you are to spend extraneous money, then it must be for the group, for all to benefit from. By buying the rotten bananas, the whole family could divide it up to share so that everybody could enjoy a little bit of the treat. The toy would only be for J’s personal benefit. As for the bananas, some context: at the time in northern China, fresh bananas would have been a rare luxury item, and expensive. Because those bananas happened to be rotting, they were discounted to a dollar. FIL would cut up the bananas, give his wife and son the good parts, and then eat the rotting parts himself.

I noticed FIL’s communal philosophy as applied to my earnings and my achievements, which he wouldn’t characterize as “yours” (when speaking to me), but would characterize as “ours,” him inclusive. My income is theirs (“ours”). Everything in my kitchen, in my home, all my things are theirs (“ours”). He felt entitled to free legal services any time all the time, and sure, okay fine. But he also felt entitled to volunteer my free legal services to all of his friends. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to do free legal work for the in-laws and the complete roster of their acquaintances. To FIL, every individual family member’s possessions and skill sets belonged to the entire family, and everybody in the collective is entitled to your possessions and your skill sets at any time.

After MIL’s condition worsened, the FIL took care of her, but took care of her to a minimum necessary standard. Everything he did was about keeping her alive, not about her quality of life. MIL’s one dream, one bucket list item was to go on a cruise, which admittedly would be more expensive because it could only be a cruise line that offered onboard dialysis and had a physician on staff. But reasonably, by J’s and my adult years, this “expensive” bucket list item was more than affordable. It could have easily been arranged, to nobody’s detriment. But FIL said no because he saw it as extraneous and unnecessary. MIL died never having gone on that bucket list cruise.

I think the only time I ever witnessed MIL cry was when the four of us, the in-laws, J, and I were in the car. The conversation was supposed to be in good fun, and J, in a tone meant to indicate teasing, strolling down memory lane, recounted all the ways that FIL was cheap, how because of FIL, J’s childhood was one of lacking, what most kids, even the “poor” ones had but he didn’t because of FIL, recounting that time FIL did this, this one time FIL did that, intended to be “ha ha remember when” funny stories making light of J’s sense of deprivation as a young boy, which is why, getting to the punchline, middle-aged grown-up J needs to buy Transformers dolls. Cue what was supposed to be laughter. But instead out of nowhere MIL burst into tears and, through her sobs, started screaming at the FIL. “The way you controlled our money, the way you made us live, look what you’ve done. Look at how much our son resents us.”

After MIL’s passing, FIL’s idea of a funerary altar for her was tealights they rummaged from around the house and food offerings set on paper plates. I didn’t meddle with the in-laws’ funerary approach because that’s their family’s prerogative. I’ll just say that in my family culture, which can be generalized to say most Taiwanese families’ culture, not only would that not have cut it for honoring the recently departed, but that’d probably be viewed as an insult. If someone in the immediate family dies, be prepared to drop a small fortune. Can it even be described as a “small” fortune? The expense is going to rival that of a wedding.

MIL’s cause of death left the ghost of an elephant in the room, present and hovering at all times. FIL’s single-minded focus on thriftiness meant that he overlooked a simple cost-benefit analysis, one that might have saved MIL’s life, before heading off to Walmart to claim his free eyeglasses. But we can’t talk about it. Add it to the long list of things related to FIL that no one is permitted to say out loud.

After confirming that the FIL would be moving in to live with us, J said to me, “our sole responsibility is to just keep him alive” and advised me to “minimize contact,” Initially I objected to his approach. How could that possibly be your attitude toward someone who gave you life, someone you owe the deepest most unconditional love to? And then over the months that have become years, I learned how FIL’s approach to parenting J was exactly that– he equated parenting with “just keep the kid alive” and he himself minimized contact with his son.

When I reminisce about childhood with my father, I recall long philosophical conversations with neither point nor purpose, just fun. I asked J to reminisce about childhood with his father and to tell me what immediately comes to mind. J said, “Getting beat with his belt.”

For Christmas my father would hang up festive lights and there would be a landslide of presents under the tree. On Easter morning we’d wake up to little bunny paw prints on the carpeting (made with stencil and talcum powder) forming paths that start just outside each daughter’s bedroom door to somewhere in the home where we would find a giant basket of gifts. (This is also why I believed the Easter bunny was real until embarrassingly late in life. Because I had evidence! The bunny paw prints were proof!) Meanwhile J never had any fun or celebration during holidays, because FIL sees holiday celebration as ridiculous.

As for why J would advise to minimize contact, it’s because of how difficult it is to have a peaceful conversation with the FIL. He is the type who will mansplain economic policy to an economist, law to a lawyer, and medicine to a doctor. J once said about his father, “He has an uninformed opinion about every subject, and worse yet, he’ll force his opinion on you. There’s no reasoning with him.” You can’t disagree with him, and you can’t debate. His way is right. Your way is wrong. End of the discussion. If you persist, he’ll lose his temper. There will be an argument. The more you escalate, the more he escalates. In no scenario will he ever acknowledge that he’s wrong, and if deep down he does intuit that he may be wrong, he deals with it by lashing out at you.

Not only does he mansplain, he imposes his decision onto everyone around him. He would hover over the MIL while she was doing whatever she was doing. If she’s in the kitchen cooking, he’d give unsolicited advice and tell her what she’s doing wrong. At first she ignores him. Seeing that she’s ignoring him, he’ll push his views on her harder. At some point she finally says no, I’m not doing it your way. He erupts with anger, accusing her of disrespecting him. Not about to take it, she erupts in turn and starts calling him names. Now the two are screaming at each other and before they can come to blows, J has to stop whatever he’s doing and rush to them to break up the fight.

If you have something cooking on the stove and you’ve set the heat on Medium for a reason, he’ll take it upon himself, without inquiring you about it, to turn it up to High. If you’ve been simmering a shellfish reduction for the last three hours to make a sauce and delightfully it’s almost done, he’ll come by and fill the pot back up to the brim with water, diluting your reduction. (That time I almost cried, because it was with lobster.) Finally one day I snapped, reported all this to J, and he worked some behind-the-scenes miracle with his father, so now when I’m in the kitchen, FIL stays in his room, door shut. Problem solved. But that’s the thing. Such a problem-solving approach goes back to the point “minimize contact.” It’s not really a solution.

As for his thriftiness, it is beyond. Let’s talk about the heater situation. FIL refuses to turn the heat on in winter. Instead, he’ll wear a puffer coat indoors and layer up the sweaters just to save dollars on the heating bill, and expect J and me to do the same.

When my parents visited one winter, they were horrified by the heater situation, especially since my mom sees me as being of frail health and catching cold easily. My mom exclaimed, shivering, “Why is it 40 degrees inside the home? Why is everyone wearing coats indoors?!”

“The father-in-law complains if we turn on the heater,” I explained. “He sees it as wasteful.”

“I’m sorry, I’m confused. Is he the one paying the bills for this house?”

“Ma, that’s not the point.”

“That is the only point.”

Oh mother, what a capitalist ideology, I think jokingly to myself.

For three winters since the FIL moved in I suffered the indoor cold in silence. I learned to layer up and wear thicker sweaters in my own home, and made sure I was always wearing really warm wool socks. But my mom was like, not so fast, not under my watch.

It only took one visit from my mother to change it all. She complained and griped loudly in front of J and the FIL about how cold it was. She’d guilt-trip them with concerns over my health. After she left, J would override the FIL and proactively turn the heat on when it got cold. Thanks, mom! 😉

Something that struck me as fascinating was FIL’s communist attitude toward gender equality. FIL’s attitude of women is that they should be useful. Women should go out into the workforce and get a job and contribute to family finances. But likewise, men should do at least half of the household chores. FIL cooks and cleans, which hilariously, is a point of complete shock to the Taiwanese.

Likewise, FIL would expect his daughter-in-law (me) to share equally in the responsibility of providing for the family. An old school Taiwanese family might adopt the attitude that a woman having a career in addition to caretaking the home is a “nice-to-have,” but in a mainland Chinese family, it’s all but expected that the woman would have a career and contribute to the family’s collective income.

There was this one time my parents and the in-laws went out for dinner and my father was de-shelling crab for my mother. My mom would just sit there, as she does, and wait for my dad to de-shell the crabmeat for her and set it on her plate. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, because that’s just what they do, except for the jaw dropping from the in-laws.

“What’s the matter, are her hands not working?” asked the FIL. “Why can’t she de-shell the crab herself?”

I guess it was a sight that really had an impact on FIL, because he brings this up often. He’ll laugh and say to me, That mother of yours… living like an empress. She doesn’t work. She doesn’t even de-shell her own crab legs.

My dad has a knight-in-shining-armor gentlemanly approach toward my mother. He doesn’t want her to have to work, or have to worry about money. He views it as his sole responsibility to be the provider. Whereas the FIL takes the feminist motto popularized by communism “women hold up half the sky” and interprets it as “women should hold up half the sky.” Providing for the family is an equally shared responsibility among the partners.

Where my father chivalrously treats my mother like a damsel in distress, FIL all but leaves the MIL to her own devices, with the attitude, she’s perfectly capable of doing it herself, so let her do it herself. For even the most basic act like having FIL help MIL fold up her wheelchair, push it across the narrow door frame, and unfold it for her to sit in, MIL needs to bark at him, spell it out explicitly for him.

And yet let’s give credit to the progress that communism brought for gender equality in China. Because of communism (“women hold up half the sky”), a woman’s opinion now had to be valued equally to a man’s opinion. Both men and women, of any socioeconomic background, had equal rights to education and to becoming literate. The government strongly encouraged women to join the workforce alongside men, and men to help out with domestic tasks.

An interesting side effect was the erasure of gender performance. Prior to communism, there was a defined way to perform acceptable femininity, and a defined way to perform masculinity. The aftermath of communist gender equality meant that women didn’t and shouldn’t have to be “feminine” and men didn’t and shouldn’t have to be “masculine” by the former traditionalist standards.

While credit is due to how communism advanced feminism, it still had its limitations. The killing and the abandonment of infant girls in light of the state-enforced one child policy, in favor of having baby boys, still happened. That’s because you can’t topple 2,500 years of Confucianist patriarchy with an overnight government-mandated ideological movement. But at least practices such as foot-binding little girls can be outlawed, and were. Division of labor by gender can be put out of fashion. Women could file for divorce and were given access to birth control (which, sure, sadly they used to abort baby girls).

As difficult as the generational, cultural, and ideological gaps might be, the FIL has taught me a great many things, and he is authentically a paragon of many qualities we could all do well to embody.

He’ll wash vegetables in a giant bucket, saving the water, and then carry that bucket out to water our plants. He reuses everything. The tin box your cookies come in, that jar of olives, even plastic wrap and aluminum foil. He never uses a paper towel just once. And if he can use a tattered shirt as a dish rag instead of a paper towel, then he will. I’ve learned to follow suit.

Nothing goes to waste with him, not the vegetable skin you’ve peeled or the cores of fruits—all of it can go in the compost. After you’ve made that chicken dish, save the bones and make a stock. Then save the bones you used for stock to make compost for the garden. Never throw away eggshells or used coffee grains, or vegetable or fruit peels for that matter. Keep on reusing that frying oil. These really aren’t bad practices to adopt.

I’ve picked up gardening skills I wouldn’t have thought to learn, like saving the bases of store-bought bok choy, planting them, letting them sprout yellow flowers, and then the flowers will drop seeds. Collect those seeds, unearth the flowering plants, and then sow those seeds. In no time you end up with a garden full of baby bok choy leaves, which are absolutely delicious and nutritious.

I’ve also learned to appreciate perspectives that I otherwise would not be exposed to living in the bubble that I do. I’ve learned, well, continue to learn how to aspire for temperance with someone who is different from you in every way possible, to refrain from judgment before you’ve fairly placed the situation in its context, and to actually begin to understand the fundamentals of inequality.

How wild and amazing is the lot of fortune for someone like FIL and someone like me to get tossed under the same roof, to have to learn how to coexist peacefully?

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Next Installment. Part III: China-Taiwan Relations