1 . I love my father. He’s the parent who I thought understood me. But when I was growing up, he was ______ home. He worked overtime as an accountant, late into the evening during the week, all day Saturday and most Sundays. Even if he was home, and wasn’t working at his desk, I had to ______ him, because I was one of three daughters. All those years in my childhood I longed for my father’s ______.

One day my father was working at his desk. I ______ him there and stood beside the desk. ______ in his writing, he didn’t notice me. To let him know I was there, I lifted my plastic water gun and shot him in the face. This frightened him and he roared like a tiger. I dashed out of the room and down the stairs. I was so _______ because I’d never seen him angry before.

Moments later, he appeared at the top of the stairs, ______ his arms and laughed; his arms and laugh invited me to run back up the stairs and into his huge hug. Comforting me softly, he ______ for scaring me. I kept replaying the _______ in my mind for a thousand times.

My sense that I couldn’t reach my father stayed with me even when I was grown. Well into adulthood, I felt that I could never ______ the father time I’d missed as a child. But it turned out that I could. And I did.

The ______ started when my father retired. One day, I called when my mother was out. My father answered the phone, and he couldn’t hand me over to my mother, ______ we started to talk. He told me he’d been thinking about his grandfather, and I asked about him. He began telling me. I ______ that when I asked him about his past, he stayed on the phone. And the older he got, the more ______   my father was to talk about his past, especially his childhood. In his detailed descriptions, I felt he was recreating the world of his childhood, and ______ me in. The stories he told became a world we inhabited together. He introduced me to the people he knew there, and to the child he was.

I really cherish my father’s stories and will pass them on to the next generation.

I shut my lunch bag quickly as I saw what was in it.

The strong familiar smell of garlic(大蒜)and onion brought back some memories of middle school lunch times. That day, when I opened my lunch bag with Chinese fried tofu in it, the boys and girls shouted, held their noses and ran away. I went red in the face. So for the rest of middle school, I insisted having “normal” food for lunch like ham and cheese sandwiches instead.

This morning, before Mom rushed out for work, she simply spared some of her lunch in my lunch bag. It was not Mom’s fault(过错). As a busy single mother, she always gives me her best .Every time I invite my friends home, the Chinese spring rolls and rice puddings Mom makes always amaze them and fill their stomachs.

What would happen today? I felt nervous and restless.

I was at a loss when Mary and Tommy, my best friends in high school, came over and shared the same lunch table. My friends happily pushed their lunch bags in front, inviting me to share mine. Hesitantly, I did.

3 . In 1990, during a performance of my stage play, I became preoccupied with one particular member of the audience. While everybody else laughed, there she sat, staring at the floor, with her fingers in her ears. I’ll never forget her look of complete discomfort.

That woman was my mother. Despite the fact I’d established myself as a humorist, my mother never found me or my work particularly funny. She was my hardest critic. “Is Drew really that funny?” she’d ask family members.

To make matters worse, the feeling was mutual (相互的): though our social circle swore that she was humorous, I never saw it. My mother was supposedly very funny in her first language, Anishinaabemowin—an Indigenous (原住民的) language, but alas, I didn’t speak it. At family gatherings, when somebody would say something “funny” in Anishinaabemowin, she’d explain it to me. Sometimes the humour translated. Sometimes it didn’t.

For a while I was convinced I would never make her laugh. Then, in 2005, I succeeded. I had published a book called Me Funny. In it were dozens of essays deconstructing Indigenous humour, along with 50 so-called “Indian jokes” to break up the various chapters. (For instance, “Why do Native people hate snow? Because it’s white and all over our land.”) She laughed hard and declared, “Wow, that was funny!”

In 2009, my mother passed away at the age of 77. During the funeral, in the tears, family member after family member got up and recounted things she had done and said over the years. To my surprise, I found myself laughing. Suddenly I remembered a moment from the early ‘90s, when my mother asked me, completely serious, what “owie” meant in French. I struggled to come up with an answer until I spelled it out in my mind: oui (“yes” in English).

More and more stories about her surfaced. We laughed as we remembered her. I couldn’t see my mother’s forest for my own trees. I wish I could have shared those laughs with her while she was alive, but I’m glad I finally made the connection.

10 . My husband Sajan is an Indian with a vegetarian heritage. Since I met him, I’ve been a vegetarian, too. Getting older, I wonder if I ignored my parents’_________. After all, they are more _________ with meals where meat is the centerpiece.

Whenever Sajan and I come home, my mom starts _________ our meals weeks before we arrive. She researches new _________ dishes and stocks up on beans and yogurt though she _________ both. So often, even though we’re all _________ at the table together, we’re eating _________ meals. I’ve never really _________ with my mom about the food tension in our relationship. But earlier this summer, I _________ asked her about it.

“It is sometimes a(n) __________to cook your food,” she admitted. “But it is important for us to __________ your and Sajan’s Indian vegetarian diet.”

She also had her question, “You don’t miss the __________ you grew up with?”

I do. And I don’t.

My mom still makes my favorite cookies. But because I’ve been away from home for so long, I’ve __________ lots of new foods, and Indian food has become my food. I always assumed she felt hurt by that, but talking to her, I __________ I was wrong.

Love can be shown through food in different ways. Just make a little room for what our loved ones choose to__________.