soopastryheart

Honie is currently visiting me in Seattle and today happens to be her 14th birthday. If I hadn’t been so overwhelmed with work, I would’ve written a completely new entry, but fortunately, I found this old essay I wrote for a class in 2007 that could suffice. I feel slightly horrible for recycling material (especially for such a special person on her special day), but all the sentiments still hold true. This kid inspires my life and writing in so many ways (like here and here), that I guess this isn’t too much of a copout.

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At first the cupcakes were a ploy to fatten her up. Honie was always the smallest in her class, always a foot shorter than everyone else. My brother and I had been fat toddlers, so my mom was concerned that Honie could have a deficiency. After all, my mom was forty years old when Honie was born, and we all thought it was a little bit crazy. It didn’t help that Honie preferred vegetables to anything else, and that she put hot sauce over everything – her diet wouldn’t allow her to gain the weight. So we started to bake cupcakes a couple times a month, in hopes that she’d at least plump up from licking the sugary bowl. Even when I moved away for college, we would still carry on our Betty Crocker tradition, despite the fact Honie hadn’t gained a pound.

And as always, I left in a hurry. Poor time management left freshly baked but unfrosted cupcakes on the counter. “Don’t frost all of them, mom hates that stuff!” I yelled towards my brother’s vague direction as I rushed out the door. But of course, he hadn’t listened, or forgot, or both. Ki stood in the kitchen, holding a butter knife in his hand, half-heartedly slopping a glob of rainbow chip frosting on one cupcake after another.

That’s when she said it. My then four-year-old sister screeched out the words that became infamously permanent in our storytelling: “DON’T PAINT ALL THE CUPCAKES! SHE TOLD YOU NOT TO PAINT ALL THE CUPCAKES!”

Ki stared at her shocked, a knife frozen in one hand, a naked cupcake in another. “What?”           

“She said not to paint all of them!” It was a clear scold, almost condescending as to say, you are such an idiot! You had one task and you can’t even do that!

Ki’s laugh was a crescendo; tiny mumbled bubbles at first but gradually climbing to obnoxious decibels. “Paint them?” He spat out.

Honie could sense the mockery in his tone and instantly dropped her authoritative demeanor. “…Yeah” she said more softly, less self-assured.

I laughed with Ki when he relayed this story to me, dismissing it as a possible episode of “Kids Say the Darnest Things!” But now I categorize that little moment as being the encapsulation of Honie’s entire being; a kid who is confident enough to be a bit different, but completely oblivious to that fact. Painting cupcakes and Honie have become synonymous, and for me, it has meant more than just a silly story. Honie is the most colorful, flavorful cupcake in the batch and it didn’t matter if she frosted, painted or scotch-taped her way to it.

When Ki dropped the F-bomb in front of her when she was six, she gasped like most kids would do, but unlike them, she never threatened to tattle (we just aren’t that type of family). I did however, tell her that only unintelligent people cussed because they didn’t have anything smart to say. Four years later when Ki tried to bribe her to say just one bad word, she rolled her eyes, and replied, “only dumb people cuss”. I had forgotten what I had said. She had not.

“I’ll give you twenty dollars if you say shitface.”

“No.”

“Fifty if you say fuck-ass.”

“You’re an idiot.” And with that, she ended the conversation to watch CSI Miami.

As an older sibling, there is always an unspoken obligation to lead by example, but I don’t feel burdened. Sometimes I worry about how willing and open Honie is to take everything I say as nothing but the absolute truth, but I am honored to be viewed as such an important person in her life. And I’m not worried that I may influence her too much; if she has proven anything at all, it is that she has too much personality to be pushed around.

Over the years I have lovingly observed the type of kid Honie is: wildly compassionate, highly intuitive, and unwavering in her principles. She is the type of kid who dutifully accompanies her grandmother with her daily prayer each night, understanding how upset she gets that no one else will. Last summer when she came to stay with me for a week in Seattle, she never complained once about being bored when I had to stay in to study for finals. Instead, she read her books (commenting how “that Charles Dickens guy” was a good writer), figured out how to use TIVO, and even washed the dishes when they had begun stacking up (even though I had to rewash them later). And while we all tend to leave my dad alone when he sits quietly in his office looking at his favorite photo of my late grandfather, Honie will walk in, give him a kiss on the cheek, whisper an “I love you oppa”, and promptly walk out. Even though it’d be easy to dismiss her little act as being nothing more than adorable, I believe that Honie’s intuition told her she could help ease his heartache. Her subtlety was the only thing that could have gotten through.

She has always been more than a little precocious: when turning on the radio in the car, she is quick to skip over the latest Fergies or Gwen Stefanis before settling on BeeGees (thanks, Dad), to which she knows all the words. She has always preferred old classics to new fads; never apologizing for liking something her friends did not (she is the only ten-year-old I know that knows who Ann Margaret is). Her first crush was Brad Pitt, when I found her on the floor of Blockbuster, dreamily gazing at the cover of Meet Joe Black. She later described her affection for him the same way I did with JFK Jr. when I was her age. I get the feeling that if she weren’t twelve years younger than me but perhaps two, we would be competing for the same boyfriends.

During one Seattle visit, when I had returned back to my apartment after my very last final, Honie greeted me at the door with such an enthusiastic “did you do good?” that it didn’t matter I felt totally defeated from the test, I was just glad to be done. I wanted to cry out when her twig-like arms wrapped around my neck; I felt so undeserving. I felt I had failed to live up to the person she saw me as, someone she could brag about, someone who could handle a stupid test without feeling so pathetically drained.  But she looked at me with her hopeful, unreserved eyes, and I realized none of that mattered. What she offered me was absolutely unconditional; I didn’t have to earn anything at all. I dropped to my knees to be at her height and I enveloped her body with my arms. As I hugged her, I felt all the emotional and physical exhaustion leave my body, as if she had silently shoo’ed them away. For a family as close ours, she is the constant (and most surprising) source of rejuvenation for our souls, boosting our spirits and hopes when we need it most.

And it’s always been that way with her. Because when I look at her, I see everything that is good in this world. When I’m around her, I forget that the MCAT’s are around the corner, or that my water bill is astronomical this month. Without saying a word she’s able to stop me from spinning out of control in stress and worry. She won’t love me any less if I don’t get accepted to Johns Hopkins; she’s more concerned if I can’t ride Space Mountain four times in a row. Most of all, what I see in her is everything that I used to be; stubbornly ideal, and annoyingly optimistic. I think about how much I’ve changed since her age, and I then start to worry that some day soon, Honie’s love affair with simplicity will weaken and dissipate. I worry that she really will turn out like me, someone too concerned about planning for the future, someone too busy and preoccupied, someone completely obsessed with pleasing everyone else, someone who actually has to worry about the calorie content in a rainbow chip cupcake.

There is a part of me that wants to preserve Honie in a jar. One time we were in the candy section at the supermarket, when trying to waste time while my dad finished shopping, I asked her to try to create a sentence using a candy bar in it. As an example, I started off with, “The 3 Musketeers and I went out on a date.” Honie thought for a minute, scoured the rack, and finally said, “My penis is Nutrageous!” (obviously Ki’s teenage vernacular has found a way into Honie’s). Even though I laughed like a maniac at her unexpectedly perverted joke, I worried that her days as an innocent and charming kid were limited.

Sometimes I want to warn her. Sometimes I want to shield her from everything that could possibly tarnish her charm and joy for life. But I hold back, because I know she’s smart enough to figure these things out on her own. And taking a step back, I realize my life isn’t as miserable or less fun just because I got older, it just got a bit more complicated, a little bit more hectic. What kind of person would I be if I wanted to prevent her from facing challenges simply because I didn’t want to see her hurt? She may be small in size, but she had clearly proven that her heart was big and strong enough to handle anything, even Ki’s incessant teasing. 

Honie is still the smallest in her class, with her skinny ankles and wrists, and her new purple-rimmed glasses, she is hard to miss in the class photo. We joke about how abnormally large her feet are compared to the rest of her body, but she assures us that one day she’ll be five-foot-ten, and walking the catwalks in a Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show while working on her “dentist-stuff” from Harvard (I don’t have the heart to tell her that this will be seemingly impossible to do simultaneously). The baking tradition still continues to this day, with Honie yelling out, “okay, let’s do this, let’s get me fat!” This I hope never changes, no matter how old we get; that each time I go home, a box of cake mix and a can of rainbow chip frosting will be sitting on the kitchen counter, waiting to be frosted, waiting to be painted.

–November 2007

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I love you kid, more than you’ll ever freaking know. Happy Birthday.