
Ostensibly, Thanksgiving is about the celebration of the coming together of the Pilgrims (who were a group of people who came over from England to, ostensibly, escape religious persecution).
By ostensibly, I mean that this fact-of-sorts had been sort of softly hammered into my head since I was old enough to place a chubby little hand on a piece of brown construction paper and shakily trace a pencil around its outline. The thumb would become the turkey’s head, and all the rest of the fingers became its feathers. I learned other important skills in school too, like how to tell on people who were cutting in line and how to sometimes get two snacks instead of one.
By ostensibly, it means that no child growing up in the good ol’ United States of America escaped this annual exercise, so it sort of fits the narrative that teaching children history in America meant that you’d inundate them with picture books full of smiling Pilgrims and smiling Indians (somewhere along the line, we learned to say “Native Americans” instead), with a fat turkey as the centerpiece of a long table. We’d go around in circles, practicing giving thanks to our parents, our friends, our golden retrievers, or our goldfish at home. The word Thanksgiving, let alone “Chinese Thanksgiving,” was as foreign and familiar to me as stockings at Christmas (we didn’t have the stockings).
But everyone was always smiling in the books. So it meant that everyone was happy.

I grew up in Boston’s Chinatown, so the yearly turkey exercises and watching Thanksgiving sitcoms specials on TV juxtaposed hilariously with the thirty-odd not-white-and-mostly-Chinese kids in my classroom. We did all the turkey things, but as far as I knew, no one went home and actually ate turkey on Thanksgiving. As far as I knew, a Chinese Thanksgiving didn’t and couldn’t have existed.
As I got older, I learned that people in real life really did have those Thanksgiving dinners.
My dad drove us to the Norman Rockwell museum in Western Massachusetts once, which was the first museum where I really learned to enjoy the art, because, well, it was Norman Rockwell. I wasn’t staring at water lilies (hi, Monet) or depictions of Christ and blood and war and victory, things which I relegated dismissively as Things That Happened to Adults A Long Time Ago.

There were people on these canvases – people with rosy cheeks and raucous toothsome laughs and expressive postures. They fished and they ran and they went to the doctor’s office. Like me. And I saw a delightful white America that was so comfortable that I forgot I didn’t belong in it.
And then, there was this one.

Freedom from Want, The Thanksgiving Picture, or I’ll be Home for Christmas, depicted a Thanksgiving so idyllic that it was quite literally a caricature of what a Thanksgiving should be. A hefty turkey, requiring a good two-arm lift from an aproned matriarch with greying wispy hair, forms the foreground. There’s silver china on the table, and generations of a family sitting around it. Everyone has a smile on their face.
This was one of the moments where I realized that we did not have those Thanksgivings.
A Real Thanksgiving
I longed for a “real” Thanksgiving. I dreamed of the Thanksgivings I saw on Friends and on Everybody Loves Raymond, where a fat perfect golden-brown bird sat cozily as the centerpiece of an antique dining table. Arranged meticulously around it would be cranberry sauce, stuffing, mashed potatoes, pumpkin and apple pie. It was the same type of longing that I saved for Lunchables – those processed snack-packs masquerading as lunch of the 90s – and for, strangely enough, being able to wear shoes indoors, because I saw the kids in the movies do it.

Thankfully, I grew out of those last two.
I don’t remember the why or the when of the time we finally got that real Thanksgiving, but I remember that we had it. My mother, a veteran of wok-fried vegetables and hand-wrapped dumplings, was no match for the classic American Thanksgiving spread. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d used the enormous oven.
Because of that, that meal was a product of a grocery store package – the ones where your local supermarket (Shaw’s in our case) packages up the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, in plastic containers and hands it over the deli counter into your waiting hands. A convenience Thanksgiving.
It was far from the elaborate home-cooked meals that appeared on the front page of Southern Living, but kid Lily couldn’t tell the difference. Those plastic containers could have held months-old canned boiled beans, and I wouldn’t have cared. If they tasted anything like my favorite restaurant, Old Country Buffet, (a moment of silence for this stalwart symbol of American suburbia), then I would have gobbled up every soggy green bean and slimy turkey slice.
“We can have our own Chinese Thanksgiving,” she’s said proudly, in front of the black plastic containers of pre-cooked food.
That was the genesis of our kind of Thanksgiving: the Chinese Thanksgiving.

The next Thanksgivings after that were a blur of sometimes-turkey and sometimes-not, in the way that the solidity of holiday memories as children inevitably give way to the haziness of those that take place during adulthood. Simple joys and simple feelings for gifts and Christmas trees and red envelopes are replaced by money troubles and geographic challenges. And critical thinking about the origins of our holidays. Did it really even make sense that this Chinese family celebrated a twisted and sanitized mythos of early colonists and indigenous peoples breaking bread together?
Feeling strange about it all coincided with my leaving the nest. I’d gone abroad to London, moved away from my family when I started a job in Boston, and then found a new life in Hong Kong. I wasn’t always around for Thanksgiving, and couldn’t recall which I’d spent at home and which I hadn’t.
But I did have gems like this to remind me that they still took place.

In 2019, I did go home.
The Thanksgiving of 2019
This Chinese Thanksgiving, my mother had ordered a turkey dinner from the supermarket. It included a full turkey, a plastic container of mashed potatoes, a plastic container of stuffing, a plastic container of cranberry sauce, and a pecan pie.
She’d also found it necessary to go to Chinatown Café, which I’ve written about briefly in my nostalgic post here, a stalwart of cheap and dependable eats in Boston, and get a full-sized goose, a roast duck, roast pork with crispy skin, and soy sauce chicken. This, in Chinese cuisine, would have all qualified as siu mei, a genre of Southern Chinese cooking that revolves completely around roasted meats.
On Thanksgiving Day, she and my dad spread silver tin foil around the 18 pound turkey and warned me to watch it and set an alarm until it was done.
I opened the oven and peeked in occasionally. There it was – the marker of our home, of the nearly three decades that I’d lived in this country, and the biggest signifier that I’d really come home for the holidays after spending nearly three consecutive years in Hong Kong.
A few hours later, the group of people inside the house had grown as the day’s guests arrived. My mother had laid out the spread: the turkey spent an entire two and a half minutes in its unadulterated glistening golden state before it was completely desiccated by my father wielding the heavy cleaver so ubiquitous in Chinese homes. In a Chinese home, you do not attack a hunk of flesh on your plate with a sharp knife, to be used only by yourself. Meat is sliced thinly – to be easily picked up by chopsticks and accompanied by rice.
Even the turkey didn’t escape this treatment.


And all around it were the Styrofoam boxes of roast duck, roast goose, and roast pork that my mother had carefully arranged – dishes that she’d not had the time and capacity to make from scratch at home, but that would taste like home. Next to those were plates of pan-fried dumplings that she’d carefully folded and wrapped in advance, bursting with pork and chive filling and crispy on the bottoms.

It didn’t look like the Norman Rockwell painting of a Thanksgiving. And, to be sure, of the ten people that were in the house at that moment, only three of them were connected to me by blood. Next to the dumplings were stir-fried green beans with chili sauce, and next to those were an apple pie, a grocery store pecan pie and pumpkin pie, and the pineapple cakes I’d brought home from Hong Kong.

As the afternoon went on, I let my fingers run over the old upright piano in the dining room between forkfuls of turkey, unpracticed fingers stumbling over Chopin and Mozart. I sipped a Chardonnay that my parents had brought home from a wine tasting in Rhode Island.
I opened an oversized bottle of red that looked suspiciously like it’d been sitting in the fridge for too long – not to mention that it also looked like the dollar store version of Barefoot or Yellowtail wine. I gave it a good sniff.
“This smells….pretty vinegared, don’t you think?” I said to my dad. “How long have you had it?” I tossed out, fully expecting him to say a couple weeks at the most.
“Oh, I don’t know. Six months?”
“Six months?” He noticed my gaping look of horror.
“What? It’s still good.”
In that moment, I realized that even though the food and drink served at that Thanksgiving hadn’t changed, – I, having had my fair share of drinking questionable (but affordable!) wines in college, had graduated into steady paychecks and wines-by-the-glass. And I wanted to give my dad an enormous hug for not knowing or smelling the difference.
And the mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, and cranberry sauce from the plastic tins?

They were still there, a legacy from my childish yearnings from long ago. Only this time, we’d all forgotten about them. The mashed potatoes had a good showing, although the stuffing and cranberry sauce (admittedly the most bizarre offering from a Chinese person’s eyes) laid virtually untouched. Perhaps the Chinese part of the Chinese Thanksgiving was the most appetizing part.
I looked around at the flurry of activity, the conversation, which spanned from the protests in Hong Kong, to college applications (there was a fourteen-year-old amongst us), to post-university plans, and travel in Italy. We looked into old photo albums, when my parents looked impossibly stylish (“We weren’t,” my mom said curtly) and less weathered. I was so, so, happy, but also inexplicably sad.


That’s the problem with holidays. Every new experience softly breaks my heart, because it reminds me of an old one. The people around the table are more or less then same, but the wrinkles are deeper, the hair wispier, the voices less raucous. The babies are teenagers.
I hold onto them for longer now, because I know the ones that stick in my head are few and far between, especially as I spend more time abroad. I cherish them more, because I know that in the future, there will be another Thanksgiving during which I’ll remember this one – the one with Chinese food and one Korean and one Italian guest, and when I was home for the holidays.
I am very interested in Chinese culture and I am always glad to learn something new. I’ve been following you for a while and every single article that you write is better than the previous one.
Oh, Mona this is super nice for me to hear! I’m so ecstatic that you enjoy my content, I can’t tell you how much <3
Thanks smoothie sharing, I loved reading your story. It’s really interesting to me especially to hear stories from people that travel so often or move around the world. I love that you included the thanksgiving picture from Gilmore girls because that was my favorite show as a kid. The food you had for thanksgiving also sounded delicious and like a great, fun variety.
Gilmore Girls was one of my all-time faves. I still watch on Netflix whenever i need a nice shot of New England nostalgia! Thank you so much for reading, Brittany!
This was a very interesting read. I’m yet to experience a holiday outside of my home country but I do know what it’s like to hold on to memories of things in the past especially things you once enjoyed and they’re not the same anymore.
Such a heartwarming post about Thanksgiving that brings out many old memories of mine. Nostalgic <3
Thanks so much for reading, Manahil!
Cheers, very well written. This reminds me of a pretty special Thanksgiving for my family. I work at a large university in New York and we have a lot of international students. I think my favorite Thanksgiving memory was one year we had no plans so we invited over 3 Chinese student employees who also had nothing to do. We have little kids so it was just really cool talking about Chinese traditions and sharing ours while the kids and our new friends crawled around on the floor with a globe talking about “home.” I haven’t seen or kept in touch with any of those students since, but I hope their memories of that day are as positive and impactful as ours. I think the cultural immersion and the idea of breaking bread and creating memories with an extension of the family are what these holidays are supposed to be all about. We’re so far from our immediate family now that we rarely do a proper Thanksgiving anymore, but we do what we call Friendsgiving usually a week or two after the actual Turkeyday.
Mike, it’s so interesting to me the different renditions that Thanksgiving becomes – especially when you include people who are living in American but who haven’t celebrated the holiday before.
I LOVE Friendsgiving as well because people are so prone to bring along food that makes them feel good and taps into their sense of childhood, holidays, and nostalgia. It’s so nice even when you don’t necessarily spend the holiday with your family. Thank you for sharing your experiences and thank you for reading.
Thank you for sharing your story! Yes, definitely hang on to those moments and memories. I was an only child who had much older parents, and now, almost all of my close relative are gone. Thanksgiving is nothing like it used to be. But now I’m making new memories with my children.
Patricia, I feel like our childhood memories hold onto a certain sheen that only childhood memories can take on. Please hold onto those new memories you make with your children because they’re going to be so so special for them as well as yourself!
Great read! Love it!!
Thanks so much for reading, Jessica!
I find it so interesting that so many people chase American cultural and food norms, especially in their childhood. I’m Jamaican born and raised, but I also remember seeing images of Thanksgiving and Halloween or anything American and begging to do it. Now, surprisingly, that I’m an adult and live in America and can do them, I tend to hang on fiercely and revert to Jamaican cultural food norms.
I totally relate to this. I feel like as children, we still struggle with our own cultural identifiers and where our identity fits into the world around us. As we grow up and more confident, we actually tend to long for the things that were given to us as children and hold onto them that much more fiercely. Love your comment, Kimberlie.
Hello, Lily. Aww this is heartwarming.
Thanksgiving is not really that big of a deal here in the Philippines. But we go all out during Christmas and New Year.
I agree about what you said regarding memories.
We hold on to it, the good and the bad.
Because these memories make us whole. Take care.
Thanks so much, Cherrie! I feel like we gain a totally different perspective if we live abroad. Thanksgiving is a super American holiday so I can imagine it’s not big in the Philippines (unless there are American expats).
Thank you for reading! xx