the verbs of love

april 4, 2026

Family love as action, not language. The seaweed soup, the flight number, the white gloves I haven't bought.

The note in my phone is two lines.

Saturday: CI22 China Airlines.

Coordinate pick up location for mommy on Saturday.

That's the whole entry. CI22 is the China Airlines flight from Taoyuan to SeaTac. My mom flies in on it. I drive to the airport on Saturday and pick her up. I wrote the note on a Tuesday so I'd remember on Saturday.

This is how I keep my family.

I want to sit with this fact for a while because it's the most accurate thing I can tell you about how love works in my life. I don't write long letters to my mom. I don't text her every day. I don't have the kind of conversations my American friends seem to have with their parents about feelings. What I do is I write Saturday: CI22 China Airlines in a notes app on a Tuesday so that on Saturday I am at the airport with the car running.

For a long time I felt bad about this. I read books and articles about families and assumed I was emotionally underdeveloped. The kid who couldn't say what he meant. The kid who showed up but didn't talk.

Then my grandmother Halmeoni died, and the question changed.

What I went looking for at her grave

The funeral was Saturday, September 6th, 2025. It was a hot day. It was a full moon. I wore a suit. I stood next to my dad and my brother Justin and my aunt Komo while they lowered her casket into the ground.

What I went looking for, standing there, was a memory of having told her I loved her in a way that meant it.

I couldn't find one.

We had been doing the surface thing for 19 years. I love you. I love you too. Move on to the next thing. The food, the visit, the grocery run. I love you was a script she ran on me, not one I ran on her, and now she was gone, and the surface was all there was.

Standing at the grave I thought I had failed her. The kid who couldn't say what he meant.

It took me three months to realize I had not failed her, and that we had not been doing the surface thing at all. We had been speaking the same language the whole time. I just hadn't been able to read it.

The seaweed soup as the I love you

Halmeoni made seaweed soup.

The soup did not have much flavor. I have written this in my notes more than once. I wrote it to my cousin Grace in a letter and I will write it again here because the flavorless soup is the most important food in my life.

The soup did not taste like anything because it was not for taste. It was healthy. It was for us. She made it because we were the people she had decided to make food for. Every time I went to her house there was soup. Every time I left, I had eaten the soup.

After she died I was eating something — I think it was at home, but I don't remember exactly what — and the song Made it Out of Alive came on, and I cried. I wrote that night: It made me cry while eating realizing I will never be able to see Harmoni on Earth again. I will never be able to taste her meals. I will never be able to do good for her.

The thing I noticed in the writing of that note: I will never be able to taste her meals. The verb I reached for was taste. Not see her again. Not hear her voice again. Taste. The grief was located in the soup.

This is when I started to suspect the soup had been the I love you the whole time.

I don't think Halmeoni made the soup because it tasted good. I don't think she made it because she wanted us to enjoy it. I think she made it because we were the people she was responsible for, and the soup was healthy, and Sunday was the day, and her hands knew the recipe. The soup was a verb.

In our family the noun love doesn't carry weight. The Mandarin word for love is 愛. We did not say it growing up. My dad did not say it. My grandfather did not say it. My grandmother — the one whose funeral I had just been to — did not really say it either, in the way Americans say it. The phrase I love you in our family is performed by adults who have learned it from American TV, often awkwardly, often once a year. The native vocabulary is different.

The native vocabulary is verbs. Make the soup. Pick up from the airport. Send the money. Drive to Costco. Put the medicine in the cabinet. Ask if you've eaten. The grammar of love in our family is action verbs in the second person, repeated daily, with no object pronoun.

It took losing the person who ran the most verbs at me before I could see the verbs.

The grammar of an Asian family

I want to be careful here. I am not making a claim about Asian families in general. I am making a claim about my family specifically, which is Korean on my dad's side and Taiwanese on my mom's side, lived in Taiwan and Hong Kong and Seattle, with three languages running at the same time at any given dinner.

What I noticed after Halmeoni died: when I write down the things my family members do for each other, almost none of them involve spoken words.

My dad does not say I love you to me. My dad has driven me to the SAT center in Taipei on a Saturday morning. My dad has picked me up from the airport more times than I can count. My dad has sent me money when I was broke. My dad has answered the phone the second I have called, every time, for years.

My mom does not say I love you to me very often, and when she does it is in English and slightly hesitant. My mom has flown across the Pacific to come see me at college. My mom has ordered me supplements through Amazon. My mom has texted me to remind me to eat. My mom has packed me food that I forgot to take with me.

Komo does not say it. Komo has come to every family gathering. Komo has bought presents for me that I don't remember asking for.

Justin and I argue more than we say loving things. Justin has called me the day before midterms to ask how I'm doing. I have done the same for him.

This is not a deficiency. It is a grammar. The verbs perform the function the nouns perform in other languages.

The mistake I had been making for 19 years is comparing my family's grammar to the grammar of families I read about in books and saw on TV. The books and TV have nouns in them. I love you. I'm proud of you. I'm sorry. I forgive you. I had grown up reading that there were sentences I should be saying and noticing that we did not say them. I had concluded that we were emotionally broken.

We are not emotionally broken. We are speaking a different language. The language has its own grammar. The grammar has logistics in it where other people would have words.

Once I understood this, the two-line note in my phone — Saturday: CI22 China Airlines — stopped being a sign of how poorly I communicated with my mother. It became the sign of how exactly I communicated with her. CI22 is the verb. The flight number is the relationship.

The split language of memory

Here is what is in my notes app, in a list I started two weeks after Halmeoni's funeral.

Left column, Songs I have to remember my mom:

Hou Lai

Xiao Xing Yun

You exist in my song

Those bygone years

Right column, Songs that contain my memories:

Of monsters and men (Little talks) (Sha Tin College)

Lewis Capaldi (Someone you loved) (Howard - AAIA)

Owl City (Fireflies)

Your my Flashlight (AAIA)

The Mandarin column is for after my mom is gone. The English column is for me, now.

I want to point out the verbs at the top of each column. Songs I have to remember my mom uses the verb have to. Songs that contain my memories uses the verb contain.

The Mandarin songs are obligations. The English songs are containers. I haven't worked out why my own memories got the better verb and hers got the duty verb. I think it's because I'm scared I'll forget hers if I don't enforce the list. The English songs I trust to stick on their own.

There's a longer version of this list I made later, with annotations:

Xia Hu — Those Bygone Years [Thinking of my crushes]

Xiao Xing Yun [Crush on Eva Huang I had in Kang Chiao during 4th grade]

Something Just Like This [AAIA 9th grade year]

Legends Never Die [League of Legends — SKT1 Faker dynasty]

Imagine Dragons Warriors [League of Legends — SKT1 Faker supreme]

Perfect [Ed Sheeran — 7th grade first music artist I loved listening to]

Before You Go — Lewis Capaldi [AAIA 9th grade — Best Friend Howard Hung]

Someone You Loved [AAIA 8th grade Christmas performance — Best Friend Howard Hung]

Of Monsters and Men – Little Talks [Sha Tin College — 6th grade in HK 2019 — Sigrid Poon, Chole Chow, Janice Wang, Daniel Dobson, Wayne Choi]

JJ Lin Practice Love [AAIA — crush on Midori Wang]

That's the index. Ten songs. Five schools across two countries. A dozen named people I haven't seen in three years. A League of Legends dynasty that ended in 2017. My mom's Mandarin canon. The archive of who I have been.

I have lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States. I have been in roughly six schools across those three places. The places blur. Where are you from is a question I have never been able to answer cleanly. Sha Tin College in Hong Kong is mostly the kids I named in the Of Monsters and Men annotation. Kang Chiao in Taiwan is mostly Eva Huang and the song I half-remember. AAIA in Taipei is Howard Hung and Midori Wang and a Christmas performance.

The songs hold the people. The places gave me the songs. The person I am right now, in Seattle, at UW, sophomore year at Foster, is the person who has been through every one of those rooms with one of those songs running.

I don't have a country. I have a soundtrack.

This is what the cross-cultural kids who grew up the way I grew up usually fail to admit. We don't have one place. We don't have one language. We don't have one continuous community. What we have is an audio track of where we have been, in two languages, with a list of people whose names we still remember.

The audio is the country.

The two grandfathers

I have two grandfathers.

The Korean one — my dad's father — is alive. We call him Habagi. He grew up in Seoul. His mother died when he was three. His twin brother went with the stepmother. He went with his grandfather. From age 15 to 17 he fended for himself in his hometown of Seoul, sometimes starving, working odd jobs to support himself. He does not like to travel — it does not give him peace of mind, because traveling reminds him of being young and alone and unsure where his next meal was coming from.

The Taiwanese one — my mom's father — is also alive. His own father died when he was four, when the Japanese bombed his home in China during the war. He was an only child after that. He grew up in Taiwan.

My two grandfathers were both orphaned in mid-twentieth-century Asia at age three and age four respectively. Both had to fend for themselves long before they were ready to. Both built lives anyway, raised children, sent those children to college, watched those children move to other countries.

I am the third generation. I have not had to fend for myself the way they did. I have parents who pay my Foster tuition. I have a mom who flies CI22 to come see me. I have a dad whose seaweed soup tradition his mother taught him is now my mom's tradition. I have a grandmother whose funeral I attended in a suit on a hot Saturday in September, and I had a grandfather, and I have another grandfather, and I have an aunt, and I have a brother, and the entire structure I am standing on is a structure that two boys built starting from when they were three and four years old.

I forget this on most days. I forget this every time I am at Foster crying about a midterm score, every time I am writing a manifesto about how school doesn't matter, every time I am 1 AM and watching anime and feeling sorry for myself.

Habagi was three when his mother died.

I am 19 and a sophomore at the University of Washington and the worst week I have had in the past year is a week where I bombed a midterm and cried in a hallway.

The third generation is not allowed to act like it had it as hard as the first generation. This isn't a moral rule. It's a factual rule. The privilege I am operating with — being able to write a blog about my own interior life — is the privilege of being the kid of the kid of the orphan. Habagi did not have time to write blogs at 19. He had time to find food.

Most days when I think about the white gloves I promised Halmeoni, what I am actually thinking about is whether I am being a worthy enough beneficiary of what Habagi and my Fat Grandpa did. The gloves are not a metaphor for personal discipline. They are a metaphor for staying upright on the structure they built. I will work harder and forever remember you by a pair of white gloves I shall wear to protect our family in your place. The family in protect our family is not just my generation. It is the chain.

The book for Grace

There is one thing I have done since Halmeoni died that I am proud of.

I started writing a book to my 13-year-old cousin Grace.

The book is letters. Ten of them. The first letter is dated September 14, 2025 — eight days after the funeral. I'm going to try something. I'm going to write you letters. Not advice, exactly. More like... here's what happened to me, and here's what I'm still learning from it.

The reason I started writing the letters is that I learned, at Halmeoni's grave, that you do not get to keep the people you grew up around. They will leave. The leaving is not negotiable. What is negotiable is whether you said the thing that mattered, in time, in a form that the person can carry.

Halmeoni did not need me to say I love you. She needed me to eat the soup. I ate the soup. The verb got performed. That part is okay.

But Grace is 13, and her square is filling up, and her grandmother is going to die one day, and her parents are going to get older, and she is going to come home from college one day and want to ask her mom or dad something and the person on the other end of the question is not going to be exactly the same person she grew up with. She is going to have to figure out how to keep her family the way I am figuring out how to keep mine. I don't want her to start that figuring at 19, the way I did, two days too late.

So I wrote her a book. The book has Halmeoni in it. The book has the specific stories I wish someone had written for me at 13. The book has the secret I am still trying to learn — that getting what you want in life is really about helping other people get what they want.

I do not know if she will read the letters. I think she will. She reads more books than anyone in our family. I think the letters will land. I think she will be 19 one day and her grandmother will pass and she will go looking for the time she said the thing that mattered, and because of these letters, the time will be there.

That's the bet I made when I started writing the letters, and I have not regretted making it.

The white gloves

I will end with what I started.

The note I wrote two days after Halmeoni's funeral, the Things I wish I told Hamani note, contains the line that I have been trying to live up to since:

I promise Hamani that I will work harder and forever remember you by a pair of white gloves I shall wear to protect our family in your place.

The white gloves are not a metaphor.

I do not own white gloves yet. I have not bought them. I do not know exactly what they will look like or when I will start wearing them. But the promise was specific.

The gloves are a rule. Halmeoni was 81. She ran the kitchen. She made the seaweed soup. She watched over my dad and my brother and Komo. Someone has to wear the gloves now. The gloves say that someone is you.

What I now think the gloves are pointing at, after sitting with them for eight months:

The gloves are a promise to keep performing the verbs. To keep writing CI22 in my phone on Tuesday so I'm at SeaTac on Saturday. To keep packing food for my mom when she visits. To keep showing up to family dinners even when I'm in monk mode. To keep maintaining the soup tradition at our house even though Halmeoni isn't there to make it. To keep writing letters to Grace before her squareness fills up. To keep tracking mom's Mandarin songs so the column doesn't collapse. To keep flying back to Taiwan when I'm asked. To keep being a verb, in a family that has always loved through verbs.

The gloves are not about discipline in the personal-development sense. The gloves are about honoring the grammar I was raised in. Acting like a member of the family that built me, instead of like an American who is upset that we don't say I love you enough.

I am still figuring out how to wear them. I have not bought them. The promise sits in a notes app on a Monday morning in September of last year, and the note is still active, and the work is still in front of me.

The verbs of love, in my family, have always been small and specific and unspoken. The flight number. The soup. The list of songs. The book for Grace. The pickup at the airport.

I want to be the kind of person who can read those verbs as the love letters they always were.

I want to be the kind of person who can write them back.

The gloves are still on order. The verbs are running.

Sources: Picking up mommy (Sep 25 2025) + 10/25 (Moms fav songs) (Oct 25 2025) + Songs That Contain Memories (May 2026) + Made it out of alive (song) (Oct 15 2025) + Things I wish I told Hamani (Sep 8 2025) + Promise to Harmoni (Sep 8 2025) + Dear Harmoni (Sep 18 2025) + Habagi notes (Sep 8 2025) + My Fat Grandpa (Taiwan) (Sep 8 2025) + (12-4) - A book for Grace (Dec 4 2025) + Goodbye Harmony scan (May 2026) + Letter Six to Grace (Halmeoni's seaweed soup, the funeral) + Letters to Ellia / Letters to Grace (the book project itself).