Red eggs are a symbol of rebirth
Angela Lam is the daughter of a Chinese father (nicknamed Chee) and an American mother (nicknamed Lammie Pie). Angela was raised in San Jose and is the author of a recent memoir: Red Eggs and Good Luck. The book looks back to when she was eleven years old, senior to two sisters. Her father was very much like other fathers, concerned with the cost of things, pragmatic rather than mystical, a flirt at times, not averse to solving his fiscal problems at the gambling table. Underlying his unsettledness was his apparent failure to meet his aging mother’s expectations, thereby complicating how he related to others.
Angela’s mother Lammie Pie finds him hard to deal with after so many years of wedlock. She loves him but often intervenes when the complexity of life leaves him indecisive or petulant – as when they are shopping for a Christmas tree one day. Six-year-old Elizabeth wants one that reminds her of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. Chee yells, “Don’t you know anything? That’s not a tree; that’s a shrub. What will everyone say?” He then prolongs the search by haggling: “How long this one last? . . . You have to water it? . . . How much?” He’s told fifteen dollars. “For a tree?” It’s not surprising to learn that Chee is often hospitalized with an ulcer.
Meanwhile Angela is encouraged at school by her success in writing and drawing. Her essay about a ride in a hot air balloon and her painting of a fish in water won high praise from her teachers. On the other hand, Chee feels it’s his paternal obligation to prepare her for adult life. So when she says she wants to draw, “What a waste of time,” says Chee. “I’m not talking about what you want to do. I’m talking about what you need to do to pay the bills, to survive.” Angela says there are jobs in drawing. “They don’t pay much,” says Chee – and so it goes. Out of love for her and her future ease (sounds like my own father), he would direct her into catching the right treadmill and repressing her innermost desire.
Reluctantly Chee gives in. He still can’t understand his daughter. He says, “Maybe I worry over nothing . . . Maybe you can find a way to be happy and successful . . . Remember, I always love you.” The tightness in Angela’s chest loosens. “I love you, too,” she says.
Isn’t this but an echo of the drama of our Christmas stories? Miraculous births – of women beyond childbearing years climaxed by a virginal conception of a girl from Nazareth! It makes all the menfolk in the stories hesitate – it’s all too farfetched, there’s a limit to things, history, individual lives have to repeat themselves over and over again in the same old, same old ways – as if we were required to walk through life with our backs to the future, our faces to the past, adhering to the same old polarities, the failed remedies of our ancestors, of the Herods and Caesars, rather than with our faces turned expectantly, imaginatively, faithfully toward the future and the possibility of miracles.
Yet angels keep appearing to us out of a seemingly absurd, even “impossible” future – as in the case of Zachary, of Mary, of marginal people like the shepherds – alerting us to not just new horizons but even somewhere over the rainbow. Angela even as an eleven year old must have seen such an angel or at least heard the angels sing. Otherwise why would she be called Angela and have become a writer?