Shit Asian Moms Say

In which a meme is tirelessly played on...and on...and on...

But this variation is near and dear to any skinny Asian girl who has ever come home from college or living far away and her mom will say, "You got fat."

And then she will proceed to keep telling said "fat" Asian girl to "eat more" at dinner.

In case you are wondering, yes, "You got fat" was one of the first things my mom said to me when I came home from 6 months in Europe and recently, a year and a half of living on the East Coast. But as with the case with a majority of Asian moms, harsh-sounding words is just her way of showing affection.

I Heard It Through the Class Vine

It seems that every time I tune into any Republican nominee candidate speaking (something I try to avoid for my own personal sanity), the common buzzwords include "warfare," "welfare" and "Obama," the most common permutation being, "Obama is trying to wage class warfare." What with talks of the 99% and protestors being indiscriminately pepper sprayed (and Mitt Romney not caring about the "very rich" or the "very poor"), it's fitting that right now, one of the more emerging topics discussed on the theatrical stage is the issues of class.

In two weeks, I saw two plays on two different coastlines, which represented two different types of American theater: the commercial Broadway theater and the non-profit, regional theater. The first was Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond (who was profiled in the December issue of American Theatre, on Broadway at the Cort Theater, about an African-American family during a weekend at Martha's Vineyard.

The second was Elemeno Pea by Molly Smith Metzler, at South Coast Repertory, who is also a co-worker of mine at Theatre Communications Group. That one was about two White sisters and one sister's wealthy employer on Martha's Vineyard. (Aside: I was on vacation in California when I saw this and ate so much, but not enough, Vietnamese food throughout. Lunar New Year is like Christmas for Asian people, gastronomically.)

In these two scenarios, we won't discuss the race issue (which will be the topic for another blog post). What these two plays have in common are the class discussions, in the seemingly insular world of Martha's Vineyard.