Exposed by Cinematic Fruit

On the universal joy of fresh cut fruit

On Wednesday, I went to see the 9:30pm showing of DiDi with my neighbors.

What I knew about DiDi can be summed up as follows:

1. It’s a Taiwanese movie

2. Someone wrote something nice about it that I recently read

3. It was playing at my favorite local theatre: Metro Theatre (keep independent theaters alive!)

4. DiDi is the word for “little brother”

For me, DiDi is one of my cousins, my older uncle’s youngest son, Jin Fong. His mother called him Ah-Hong, loudly and irately. He was the silliest of us all, the most likely to get into trouble, the one who would do anything to make you smile. He’s grown into a serious father and husband and I treasure the memory of him as a carefree kiddo with the easy smile.

I love a movie as a journey into the unknown. During my study abroad year, there was a theatre that did sneak preview movies once a week. They were late showings for half price or so. The one time I went, they showed Swingers. Imagine seeing Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on the big screen for the first time. The soundtrack eventually lead me to I Wanna Be Just Like You by Big Bad VooDoo Daddy and there you go, surprises are good for us.

DiDi the movie is about a month in the life of a Taiwanese boy living in California with his mom, sister, and grandmother. His father is in Taiwan, supporting the family from there. He’s chats with his friends on AOL’s IM and carries a flip phone.

{The older gentleman sitting next to me right now has a flip phone. He was also animate earlier about the ridiculousness of changing names of places in Edmonton to indigenous names. He speaks English with an accent. Did English names once sound strange to him? Change is hard.}

I’ll preserve your opportunity to see the movie without foreknowledge by not divulging much more. It was a good movie, it made me smile. I’m so happy I saw it and would recommend it.

There are a lot of Chinese and Filipinos and Koreans in Edmonton. T&T is a Chinese grocery store chain originally founded by a Taiwanese-Canadian business woman. Their hot bar is one of my favorite places to eat. Chinese food and culture, and even some difference between Taiwanese and Chinese, are familiar to most Canadians.*

This is a huge contrast to my nearly two decade experience in the Netherlands. The first week I lived there, someone told me we were getting Chinese take-out for dinner. We went to an Indonesian restaurant. Once, someone asked me if there would be any good food to eat on their train trip across China. Shopping for Chinese ingredients when we first arrived reminded me of living in South Dakota in the 1980s.

During the movie, my friend asked me if my mom offered me fruit to make up after being mad at me.

Did my mom try to make up with me with a plate of fruit? I never thought about it. There was a time when I was a teenager and half a dozen kids ended up in our living room one summer day. My mom served a cutting board loaded with orange slices and I remember wanting to make excuses. Other moms had candy or junk food. Leave it to my mom to give teenagers fruit.

Over the years, I heard and saw that lots of families had dessert after dinner. In fact, there were homes where some kind of sweet dessert was a daily occurrence. We only had dessert on holidays. If we did have a treat after dinner, it was fruit.

Then I became a mom and my kids had fruit breaks at school in the Netherlands. The morning snack break wasn’t called a snack break, they called it fruit eten or eating fruit.

After she asked me, I started noticing each time fruit came up. It wasn’t infrequent. I tell my kids to eat fruit. Just a couple days ago I cut up a peach for my son who said he didn’t want one. It’s a well known fact that children will always eat cut fruit. It’s true for adults, too. Test it. Works every time.

I leaned over and asked my friend, “Do you tell your kids to eat fruit?”

“No,” she laughed, “I tell them to eat vegetables.”

And just like that, I realized that I am a Taiwanese mom.

I’m laughing at myself for not realizing that pushing fruit on your family is not universal. I go out of my way to have good fruit in the house. In August, my daughter and I stayed with friends for a week and I made sure there were good grapes and a couple apples around while we were there.

In the universe of cultural good we pass on to our kids, I never imagined that eating fruit was a constellation. It never occurred to me that there are people who don’t get excited about fresh fruit. It never occurred to me that enjoying the taste of sweet, juicy fresh fruit was anything other than universal.

So, thanks mom.

Also, it’s peak fruit picking time, folks. Go eat some fruit. It’s good for you!