Is Culture Dying?

My mother, who is Chinese, grew up in Malaysia and came to America for college, in the nineteen-seventies. She and my American dad divorced when I was small, and this allowed her to make her suburban household as Malaysian as possible. She and my grandmother, who often visited, spoke a dialect of Hokkien, their regional language, that was used by no one else we knew. On weekends, we went to Asian grocery stores in search of niche ingredients for Malaysian food, which we spent whole days preparing. My grandma practiced Tai Chi in the mornings and, for my birthday, gave me a set of Baoding balls—small metal spheres with dragons on them—so that I could learn to swirl them around in my palm, exercising the muscles in my hands. She stuffed sticky rice into triangular packets made from lotus leaves, and hung them in our kitchen until they were ready to cook.