Category: Fun

contains objects used for play, hobbies, or craft.

Golden Pig, Wealthy Pig, Chinese Pig… Big Pig

Pigs were a blessing in Chinese culture, symbolizing abundance, wealth, and great fortune. My mother immigrated from the quaint town of Taishan in the mountains of China to the United States in 1997; she later gifted me a pig plushie when I was born in 2007, which I would come to name “Big Pig.” In Cantonese, I call it “大猪猪 (Dà ZhūZhū).” It is a soft, pink stuffed pig plushie with large, adoring, beady black eyes and a cotton-like texture that has worn down over time. As her first gift to me, Big Pig represents the beginning of my life and my relationship with my family. I am a first-generation Chinese American woman, born in the United States. My life has always existed between two worlds. This object has traveled with me between America and China throughout my childhood, when my parents were unsure about our living conditions. I carried it on airplanes when I was navigating Asia, kept it beside my bed in different homes as I moved from Corona to Fresh Meadows, and held onto it on nights when I cried myself to sleep. My family’s roots fresh out of China, our life in America created a constant sense of movement as they attempted to settle down comfortably in the States. Carrying 大猪猪 everywhere with me between homes, cities, and countries symbolizes immigration, cultural identity, and what it means to grow up between being both Chinese and American.

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My Nintendo 3DS

This is my Nintendo 3DS! It’s really important to me since it was a birthday gift from my parents. I’ve had it since 2015 and I still use it today. I’ve taken really good care of it over the years so I’m really proud of it. I really like taking photos on 3DS, and because I’ve had it for a while I’ve accumulated a lot of meaningful photos of my family and friends over the years. Some of my favorite photos I have saved to my 3DS are photos of my family from Brazil. I rarely get to see them anymore so the photos I took with them when I was younger are really important to me. To me my 3DS is more than a gaming console but is also a device that can show the perspective of a child of a Brazilian immigrant being raised in New York City.

– Erika Rodrigues

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I Don’t Need the Bat Anymore

Photo of my dad's cricket bat

When coming from Trinidad to New York City in early 2001, my dad brought along the most important tool needed to keep his passion alive: his cricket bat. This wooden bat has evolved throughout centuries, dating all the way back to the 17th century in England and it’s swung low to hit a ball. Growing up in a West Indian neighborhood in New York City, cricket was a common sport to me, and I believed it was a globally famous one, like basketball and soccer, that everyone in the world knew and played at least once. However, as I got older and started to become more familiar with New York City as a whole, I realized my childhood community, specifically my father, influenced this way of thinking. 2013 was the first time I held and was taught how to swing a cricket bat by my father. At that age I was shorter than the official bat itself and needed a smaller one, but nonetheless my dad started to pour all the culture of cricket from Trinidad into my mind and hands. This cricket bat, or really the sport of cricket as a whole, puts into focus the impact of Trinidadian immigration and its effect on the New York community, as cricket has become a much more popular sport with many professional leagues in our boroughs. Now, I can stand above the bat and swing just like he taught me to.

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Celebrating Christmas at Home and Across the Country

filipino parol

My family has always valued celebrating the holidays together. Every Christmas Eve, my whole family, including my cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws, and even plus ones, come together and have a big dinner followed by dessert and games and presents. Every year, a different family hosts. It rotates between my house and my two aunt’s houses. We start from dinnertime till late after midnight. Everyone spends the day cooking, baking, or working, then we all hangout together at night. By the end of the night, people are dropping like flies and falling asleep on any couch in sight. This tradition may have only started a few years ago, but it has quickly become something I look forward to every year. It’s a way for everyone to come together and create special memories during the holidays, which can be when you need company the most.

Not only am I lucky enough to spend Christmas with my family in the United States, but I also get to spend it with my family in the Philippines. My parents immigrated from the Philippines when they were young, and slowly all my father’s side came to America too, but minus my mother, her family is all still in the Philippines. Shortly before we started this holiday tradition, one of my family members sent us a traditional, star-shaped Filipino Christmas lantern called a parol. The lantern symbolizes hope, faith, and the triumph of light. Ever since we received this gift, we put it up in the windows, turn it on, and let it light up the house. Having this lantern makes it feel like my family in the Philippines is celebrating with us. Whether it’s in my house or from across the country, I will always feel my whole family’s love during the holidays.

– HC

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A sound carrier: My uncle’s talking drum

On a shelf in my uncle’s reading room sits a small talking drum. You can easily recognize it by its wooden frame, which is surrounded by leather strings and fitted with two leather faces. The drum only ever leaves the shelf when someone asks about it, and when it does, it always ends up in my uncle’s hands. He is very fond of it and his arms tend to fold around it like wings closing over a nest.

Traditionally, the drum is used during celebrations and coronations for kings because it has the ability to mimic the tone of a person’s voice. However, in my family, it takes on a different role. When it comes out, we gather around whoever is playing and take turns trying to guess what the drum is saying. When it reaches my uncle, the drum settles into a playful rhythm that makes people want to dance. Its crisp, tight sound is what first attracted my uncle to it. That sound was harder for him to find after he moved to the United States in the 2000s, which prompted him to get a talking drum of his own. The sound of the drum celebrates my family’s life in the U.S, but like a heartbeat, it is also a reminder of home. We carry the sounds of home with us, and the talking drum is my family’s way of sharing that sound.

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Photograph of Family Members in the Catskills, c. 1966

A photograph of my grandmother and her siblings as children, posing for a picture on a summer day in the mid 1960s in the Catskills

My object is a photograph of my grandmother and her siblings in the Catskills, taken in or around 1966. In the photograph, my grandmother is around 12 years old. My grandmother died from cancer when my father was a teenager, and thus I have never met her. She had eight children, and when her children had daughters, they named them after my grandmother. I often joke that I can know the birth order of my cousins based on what their names are, since if one of them has my grandmother’s name, I know for certain that she is the oldest daughter. Since my grandmother died long before I was born, I have very little tangible connections with her, especially since neither my father nor his siblings tend to speak much about who my grandmother was as a person. This photograph of her is one of the few objects I have that allow me to connect with my grandmother, and see her as a real person rather than as a character that occasionally appears in discussions with family members.

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A Vietnamese Family’s Hotpot

My family doesn’t have many grand objects from our Vietnamese heritage. And of those we do own, I don’t have much personal attachment to them. However, something that I’ve grown up with that I do adore is the Hotpot we always use for big dinners. I don’t know when we got it, all I know is that this pot has been in our family for as long as I can remember. Whenever we have a large group of people, usually family from out of state, we always use this for dinner. This picture is actually from Christmas dinner 2024.

The reason this pot means so much to me specifically is because of how many memories of mine revolve around this piece of cookware. Hotpot always leads to lighthearted conversations, a delicious meal, and patiently waiting for our food to finish cooking. The food each person chooses to cook and eat always reflects who they are. I remember that this specific night was when I tried fish roe dumplings for the first time and fell in love. In fact, part of the reason I’m in college is because of this pot as I actually wrote my college essay on it.

Whenever I go into storage to grab the pot, every memory of the fun and laughter it’s brought to my family comes flooding back. It may not be as glamorous as a piece of jewelry or as grandiose as a family heirloom, but our Hotpot has brought my family a sense of joy that just can’t be recreated.

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