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Watch Monday Part 3: Seiko Sports 100

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My Badass Brother

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I spent the afternoon watching the vaguely Muay Thai-related Only God Forgives. My brother Jack spent it prepping for his first-ever Muay Thai fight.

A little after 9:30pm, Jack won his match amid a cheering crowd at a sweaty boxing gym in The Bronx. I’m so proud of him.

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Crawfish Night

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I’ve eaten crawfish only a handful of times in my life, usually as an ingredient in a dish like gumbo, never by itself. I’ve always enjoyed it, but in NYC you have to go out of your way to find crawfish. As a result, I don’t eat it much.

So you can imagine my delight when my sister told me that my family here in Houston have been cooking up large batches of it every Friday this crawfish season.

It helps that the price of live crawfish has been as low as $.99 per pound at H.E.B. , because last night they bought thirty-nine pounds of it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpchan/8816062827/

That’s my uncle skillfully cooking the crawfish. The meal was accompanied by equally yummy garlic corn-on-the-cob and Seafood Alfredo. He says he learned how to make all of this from watching Top Chef.

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The best part about eating food that requires disassembly is that it forces you to eat slow and chillax with your dining partners. Here, my sister and stepmom fill me on family gossip news since my last visit to Houston.

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Here’s what the pile looked like after we finished. I stayed at the table to continue shelling the crawfish, which my uncle will cook into other dishes like Crawfish Fried Rice.

My uncle ate last after cooking the entire batch of crawfish. Dessert was Häagen-Daz ice cream bars.

Needless to say, this was my favorite meal of the trip so far.

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Happy Mother’s Day

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This was my Mom on her wedding day in 1968. Twenty-one years old.

Thank you Mom — and all the Moms in the world — for all that you do.

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At The Counter

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We wait for the same roast pork buns my Mom used to love, in a place that hasn’t changed since she first entered thirty years ago.

(Mei Lai Wah, Bayard St, Manhattan)

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To Remember You

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To remember you on the day you left us, I went to the place where you worked for a dozen years, six nights a week (sometimes seven), for eight to ten hours a day. You would come home reeking of food, oil, smoke. You did this because you had two kids to feed, a mom working in a Chinatown sweatshop, two mortgages left behind by your ex-husband.

It’s a tacky place now and probably was then, too. But when I was twelve, I thought it was cool that you worked there. The food tasted good and my friends were impressed that you waited tables at an exotic, expensive restaurant. Their parents worked at boring office jobs or stayed at home taking care of them. Your co-workers would tell me how hard you worked and how lucky I was to have you. The praise made me proud, but the impact of those words wouldn’t hit me until many years later.

Partly, it was your fault: you never let on how hard the job was, or how precarious our situation in life. Whenever we asked for money, you just gave it to us. You never told us that it meant doing an extra shift or losing your only day off. You never stopped working, even when things got better. You met a new husband, you sent two kids to expensive university, you found another home. You waited tables at other restaurants until, finally, you got to open a few of your own. Then you worked even harder.

Even at the end, you kept working, fighting even when it would have been easier to let go. It surprised everyone – except us. We knew you would never stop.

Thank you, Mom.蔡美麗 1947-2006

(Mt Fuji Steak House, West Orange, NJ)