I was eight years old, sitting on a bench at recess with a small bag of Lays ketchup chips. The multipack kind, the ones you see around Hallowe’en.

The first thing I did was let a little air out of the bag, then pressed gently from the outside, crushing the chips just slightly. Carefully, so none would spill. Crushed chips give you more per handful. In my young mind, the bag lasted longer that way.

I've been writing a memoir about the in-between - bicultural childhood, intergenerational patterns, and the quiet negotiations of raising a daughter between two worlds. Each chapter is anchored to a Chinese food that serves as a vehicle to share the tension of living “in-between”. Several weeks ago, when writing Chapter 3, I wrote about dim sum. A Cantonese-style breakfast / lunch meal where carts of food are pushed through the restaurant and you point at what you want as they pass. 

It feels a bit like choosing your own (lunch) adventure…except I never got to choose. My mom decided what I ate. 

Dessert came if she decided I'd eaten enough of the right things first. The assumption underneath, never stated but always present, was that children don't know how to choose correctly yet, so the choosing gets done for them. Writing that chapter, I kept coming back to this image of myself on a bench at recess. 

The chips were never really about chips.

In my house, snacks were assigned. Chips were rare enough to qualify as an event when they appeared. What kind, how much, when - all decided before any of it reached me. If children didn't know enough to choose well yet, then the parent's job was to make the right decisions now so the child could benefit later. 

The logic left me with one decision in an otherwise fully managed situation: how to eat what I'd been given. I crushed the chips to make them last and felt, without having any words for it at the time, that something in that small act was my choice.

My daughter doesn't do this.

When she gets chips, she chooses them. She chooses how many. She opens the bag and goes straight in, eating with the ease of someone who has never once considered they might run out before she's ready. 

The first time I noticed it, something settled in me - warm, grateful and a little surprising. The relief of watching a person move through the world without a calculation you spent years quietly running. The choice is hers from the beginning and she treats it that way, which is exactly what I wanted and also, if I'm honest, occasionally hard to watch when her choices don’t mirror mine.

My job now isn't to make the choices for her. It's to teach her how to choose - which is a different thing entirely, and one I'm still figuring out in real time. I want her to know what it feels like to make a decision that's actually hers, to sit with it, to live with how it turns out. Some of those decisions will be ones I would have made. Some of them already aren’t.

What happens in those moments is what I spend time exploring in this memoir. The more I write, the more I realize how much these small moments reveal about the distance between generations - and how much of that distance reveals itself in a bag of chips.