note from me: hello! i’m still here! thank you to all the new followers! tonight i’m in san francisco so if you’re down to clown in the Bay Area come through last minute and yell SUBSTACK during my show when i’m like “hey! how did y’all hear about my show?'“ lol. would be SUPER delighted because it meant that you read this and was like okay, wednesday night tonight 8pm ima make it to Cobb’s Comedy Club deep in the city to see Jenny! extra spontaneous life points. get tickets at jennyyang.tv or directly here. On with the stack.
if you got your immigrant dad fancy san francisco coffee would he even care?
would he care the way coffee jerks like me fetishize it. i have like 8 different ways of making coffee at home (wait that’s an estimate let me count: espresso machine, pourover, stovetop espresso, vietnamese phin, toddy cold brew, percolator, okay 6). my fiancé doesn’t understand why i have so much coffee gear (this is my Call of Duty okay?!) i love the smell, the taste, and how it’s so perfect for pairing with a sweet, carb-y treat. i love it black or sweet with syrups. i make my own syrups from scratch. heck. i make my own plant milks from scratch! (nutr machine i love it hit me up for a referral code lol) i use a scale and manually fck with my breville barista express (listen i’m not quite ready to drop 6 Gs on a home la marzocco yet). when i travel i stay in neighborhoods close to “good coffee” and you know what i’m talking about. the place better be designed like a fancy ikea showroom, the baristas definitely think they are better than you, and I need there to be single origin beans on the sans serif font menu even if i almost never get pourover. i am that jerk. i need to get multiple tasting notes on my espresso that doesn’t include essence of tire fire.
my dad drank coffee every day of his adult life. but it was freeze-dried instant coffee. barf? always a can of folgers or taster’s choice or maybe sanka in the tea cabinet. so when i wanted to share my “fancy” coffee with my dad I didn’t know if he’d even like it.
we flew up to SFO, after some doing because dad’s mobility wasn’t good anymore, and went to see my friend Nick Cho. now this was 2018. this was PRE-TIKTOK, pre-”Hey! I’m your Korean Dad!” Nick Cho. he was still running Wrecking Ball Roasters and the super cute coffee shop of the same name. we became friends on twitter talking about coffee and Asian American pop culture stuff and then became friends IRL. i had to have THE coffee expert Nick be the one to pull dad’s first fancy espresso.
Nick made him a perfect little cappuccino. dad tasted it and we waited. “whaddya think dad?” he did his performative nodding and English — it’s the way he talks when he’s speaking English to “foreigners” aka people who don’t speak Chinese. he nodded and said with his accent, “mm! very good!” with a thumbs up. but like really dad? I know it’s delicious but do you really taste the difference? i asked for more in Chinese. he was like “yeah it’s good. thanks.”
y’all. i don’t know what kind of love languages you expect from your immigrant parents but at this point in my adult life i should’ve known better than to expect anything more than this. dad said it was good. so it was good. he said it in English to thank Nick our host. that’s good enough, right? and i definitely did NOT tell them how much the coffee cost hahahahahah.
i moved to American when I was five. i grew up as the youngest of three with two much older brothers and i was the most Americanized the quickest. i grew up feeling so far away from my family. creating my own little American personality and not really having anything in common with them other than our love of food. i was never “friends” with my dad. we didn’t share anything fun together. he worked and told us to do our homework, and i got good grades, memorized the beginning of the A section of the SAT dictionary (i gave up after the word “adjuration”), and did my chores for him.
in the end, it doesn’t really matter does it? i know that to take my parents to San Francisco, to share with them something i love, was an act of love on my part. i know they received it as a whole experience. maybe dad didn’t appreciate the nuances of the expert espresso that was handroasted and pressure-brewed by Nick and his team, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip with my dad in his final years, before he descended into his dementia.
you guys. get your immigrant dad the fancy coffee. even if he doesn’t get it. you do.
question: could your parents appreciate fancy coffee? literally? and like emotionally.
addendum: here are some more photos of this little coffee outing in San Francisco with mom and dad in 2018.
dad thought this car with eyelashes on the headlights was so fun he had to take a picture with it. he’s like, come one take a picture of me.
when we were walking around Lake Merritt in Oakland dad really like these geese. (are they geese?)
if you got your immigrant dad fancy san francisco coffee would he even care?