In 1972, a psychologist at Stanford University conducted an experiment now widely known as “The Marshmallow Test”. In that experiment, children were left alone in a room with a marshmallow; they were told that they could eat the marshmallow, but that they would receive a second marshmallow if they simply waited for the experiment proctor to return in fifteen minutes. The results of this test suggested that children who resisted the siren call of the marshmallow would later see better SAT scores, educational achievement, and physical health. The lesson: children who can control themselves when faced with special treats are better off as adults.

As you all know, Kina is a big fan of Special Treats. We invented “Special Treats” back when Kina was potty training, in the early days of this newspaper. At the time, Special Treats were M+Ms that we doled out as rewards for using the toilet. As she grew tired of M+Ms, though, we experimented with different snacks, slowly amassing a crate of snacks in our pantry that Kina has since come to believe are hers for the taking whenever the fancy strikes. Mostly, she fancies little bags of fruit snacks, which she can barely resist.

It’s hard to blame her for this lack of restraint, really, because we haven’t done a great job of suggesting that restraint really matters here. It is a pandemic, to be clear, and surviving a pandemic calls for Special Treats. I have had no interest or energy in training my child to see fruit snacks as a meaningful reward. I have also, frankly, been just fine with issuing those rewards as needed for a kid who is persevering through a year-long winter unlike any I ever experienced. The child, in other words, can eat the damn marshmallow.

For a few months now, Kina has taken to blurting out charming and appropriate colloquialisms at random moments, and their frequency is growing. The robustness of her small talk, which now veers troublingly towards office-speak, is slightly absurd—would she have spoken like this had we not been trapped together at home for the last year? I forget sometimes how easy it is to hear me from the living room through the hollow-core door of our bedroom; I assume some of this jargon comes from me, though a decent chunk of it is just dialogue from She-Ra. It was hard enough keeping track of my behavior in the house when I wasn’t trying to do my job, but now I have to think about the way that I talk and act at work: my tone of voice, my choice of words, my response to stress. I have become lax in the last year, and I have no way of knowing what kinds of eavesdropping this kid is doing, or what strange neurons she’s connecting. At this point, she’ll become a management consultant by the age of five. She’ll ping me once she’s started, I imagine, and we can toss some ideas around. Like a baseball, but with more capitalism.

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I tried to convince Kina today that love could exist wherever two people did. She offered, in response, that there wasn’t much point without three. This makes sense, because most of the love that Kina has experienced in the last year has been in the context of our immediate family. She knows the constituent parts of that love—my love for her, her love for her mother, her parents’ love of each other, and all the inversions of that love—but to her, love is the love of family. Her family is three people, and so love is three people.

It is not always true, of course, that love can be found wherever people are gathered together; I know that, because I have some experience with gatherings of people—and with love. Kina needn’t worry herself with the complexities of that, for now, but it’s probably true that I need to emphasize to her the importance of there being love wherever one person can be found. She’s doing a great job of loving herself at the moment, as we have recently discussed, but you don’t get to hold onto that for free. She will need to work at it, because three people in, say, middle school? It’s not all love, girl.

At the moment, though, she spends a lot of time in this little group of three that is her family, and we do love each other. I like to imagine her walking around Brooklyn, seeing small groups of people clustered together in line for coffee, and thinking to herself, “There is love.” A mindset like that is encouraging when you scale that up to the population of New York City, of this country, of the world. As long as we’re all traveling in trios, we’ll be fine—at least if you ask the kid.

Laurea is working on a gig that will carry her through the next week, and nights are running late. This means I get to spend the evenings with Kina and watch her role-play as a working parent. Somehow, whenever she’s playing the role of her mother, the producer, she affects a longshoreman’s accent and waves her arms around as if the overtime’s about to hit. “I’m the pra-doo-sah!” she says. “It’s time ta wuhk!”

She has never seen her mother at work, but this portrayal is both highly inaccurate and extremely accurate. When Kina does this, it triggers in me a feeling that I am somehow slacking off and need to get back to the mines. She is an excellent and effective manager.

She is also going two for two this week on cover art. I’m particularly fond of the Charlie Brown nose—that’s all her.

This morning, Kina really wanted to watch a movie, and because she knows that movies are for rainy days (specifically rainy weekend days), she asked me when I expected it to start raining. Reader, I am not a meteorologist; Laurea once took a meteorology course in fulfillment of her science requirement in college, and she would regale me by phone with stories of the various sorts of clouds1, but that makes me at best an amateur meteorologist by proxy. The closest I get to meteorology is the Weather app on my phone, which I did not have near me when my daughter demanded to know on what day and time the precipitation would begin. When I told her that I could not tell the future, and therefore could also not predict the next time she might watch a movie, she insisted that daddies’ only real talent was in telling the future, suggesting that my inability to divine storms was a massive gap in my parenting skills.

I wish I could predict the future. It’s probably my number one superpower wish, followed closely by the ability to shoot fire out of my fingers.2 I won’t lie—winning the lottery is definitely one of the things I would do with magical foresight, but I’d also make more focused changes to my lifestyle based on demonstrable risk of specific diseases and probably take more risks with my career.3 Why do we want to be able to see into the future? Fear and greed, basically. But also, I would love to look into the future and know if I could afford to buy a home on a thirty-year mortgage, so that I could feel more secure about Kina’s future. Is there no college in the future? Let me teach Kina about homestead farming, then. If I could tell the future, I could know about the world I was leaving behind for my child. What would I learn about it? What would it tell me to do, in this moment? How scared should I be?

Maybe I should be careful what I wish for. We all know about snakes and apples. I’d settle for just knowing when the rain will come, so that I could stay dry and be able to start the movie on time. And fire, from my fingers—always good to keep that skill in your back pocket.

Kina led me in an extended Warrior I pose this morning. She was wearing her She-Ra outfit, including the brilliant crown and gauntlet we had thought were lost forever. Turns out She-Ra can get a pretty deep lunge in that front leg, due to her weighing very little and having rubber bands for muscles. I, on the other hand, have become brittle and awkward in the last twelve months and took the opportunity to just separate my legs for a minute or two. This is what it’s come to.

Once upon a time—before Kina came along—I was super diligent about doing yoga. Five days a week, friendly with the person at the desk, same spot in the classroom every day. It carried me through various bouts of anxiety, the founding and closure of my own business, a stretch of burnout at two separate companies, and the birth of a child. I took my last class there on March 12th, almost a year ago. The studio closed in the middle of the pandemic (obvs), but they moved to a new space and have started conducting classes online, but I have been so constantly and thoroughly drained for the last three hundred and fifty-five days of my life that I haven’t attended any. I keep thinking I will. I feel guilty about not doing it. I also feel guilty about doing it. It’s complicated.

Kina does not need yoga in the ways that I clearly do, but it’s fun to see her being so good at it without taking it seriously at all. As a teacher, she’s hard to ignore (She-Ra outfit, mismatched socks, right next to the bed), and so I might have to sign up for her classes. Five days a week, same spot every day. It’s the practice that matters—and the snacktime after.

There haven’t been a lot of opportunities this year for Kina to find ambient approval for her many good works. She gets these moments of affirmation where she can: from us, from her nanny, from the cashiers at the local grocery store, from her teachers on Zoom. The absence of a robust and natural feedback cycle had worried me for a while, but now I think the quiet has really strengthened her sense of self in a year in which Kina has come to know Kina better than anybody else. This morning, I watched her place a little pillow in exactly the right place on her bed and mutter “Good job, me.” It seems like a little thing to be so proud of, but I am a lifetime self-critic, and so it caught me off guard. Because we only have the one kid, it’s hard to know when self-affirmation generally enters the picture for children; all I know is that Kina has begun very clearly to demonstrate the kind of appreciation for her own behaviors that I frankly still haven’t mastered. The grace she extends to herself is both encouraging and astonishing to me.

Loyal readers of The Daily Kina will recall a stretch of apology storylines last year that culminated in a story on Kina’s self-absolution. In exploring her profound acts of forgiveness, I spent some time trying to identify the ways in which we had sent subtle signals about what we thought was wrong, and yet Kina’s osmotic awareness of our values—the things we uphold—seems just as powerful as her internalization of what we forbid. She looks to us for silent cues on those values: responsibility, patience, sharing, curiosity, and the committed performance of overwrought musical numbers. As I’ve watched her absorb these things, and as I’ve seen her take joy in acts like sharing food or arranging pillows, I’ve realized that I’m watching her build her own set of intrinsic values, which she will someday hold as principles that are worthy in their own right—not as means to some profitable end.

How do I know what Kina’s values are? I look to see what she does when we are not looking. We never have to cajole her to clean up; tidiness is among her values. She starts each day with a story; good storytelling is among her values. When she places a single piece of rigatoni on my plate at dinner, I can see that generosity is among her values. And of course, when she demands a fourth live performance of “Show Yourself” from Frozen II, it is obvious that she has inherited our deep-seated value of the committed performance of overwrought musical numbers.

Kina identifies as four. She identifies as a New Yorker. She doesn’t know she’s Asian because she doesn’t know what Asia is, nor what it means to be Asian—in all of its many expressions. Even if she did, it’s more complicated for her; her mother is Filipina and I’m half-Chinese, which makes her three-quarters Asian? Half-Filipina? One quarter Chinese? Asian Americans are often asked where we are from, and most of us (knowing where the question is headed) answer truthfully—we are from the place where we grew up, or where we live today. The first time you have to reckon with the fact that somebody is asking What Sort of Asian You Are is profoundly othering, but you get used to it. This morning, we were talking about where we all were born—Laurea and Lala and her Lolos, in the Philippines; Yeh-yeh, in China; Grandma, in Maine; Daddy, in Florida; Kina, in New York. I found it surprisingly hard to figure out how to get to “Asian” from there; it’s a long road.

How do I explain to her what it mean to be an Asian American? I can’t even figure out, on some days, what it means to be American. Both these identities—Asian and American—encompass so many lived experiences, and so the intersection is vast. We are much more easily identified by others than by ourselves. By being lumped in with each other, we find community and shared experience. She’s just spent an entire month in school talking about the ways in which people are the same and different from each other—the dotted lines that cross over each other and connect us, in our identity, to the people who surround us. She’s learned, in the last month, about the myriad accomplishments of Black people in this country, but she hasn’t learned about the four hundred years that made those people Black. As a preschooler, she hasn’t got the frame of reference to understand struggle in the context of race—and I’m not sure I’d put that on a four-year-old (or the teachers of a four-year-old) to do that. Kina knows that we are different, but she doesn’t know what that means.

We’re lucky that she still has no lived understanding of the ways in which entire races of people are subjected to violence every day because of the color of their skin and where they come from, but I read about it at work every day. Violence against Asian Americans has been on the rise now for a year, a quiet epidemic of hate that parallels the pandemic around which that hatred has formed. The long-standing fear of Asian people—from early nativist fears of a “yellow peril”, to the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War, to American’s more contemporary abuse of Asian Americans in the era of COVID-19—comes and goes, pushing Asians in and out of the circle of American belonging that has given us a leg up as a model minority, and to which a few of us cling with virulent jingoism. Kina, again, knows none of this history, none of this fear, nothing about the circle.

I didn’t remember having written about how Kina has called me stinky in the past, but apparently I have. I should have figured—being smelly is a key component of our shared sense of humor, and not a day goes by when my daughter doesn’t accuse me of stinkin’ up the joint. Here’s the thing: It is she who is stinky. Long gone are the days when I would hold her little head up to my nose and inhale the floral baby scent—the smell of bonding! Now, she comes in from a day outside and I can tell how sweaty she is from three feet away. Worse, the rainbow unicorn furry boot slippers that she’s been wearing more or less non-stop since Christmas have grown increasingly rank (see the second headline from our February 6th edition), and she has refused to allow us to launder them. (Somehow her preternatural sense of smell has not picked up on this development, which is a pity.) It has finally reached the point where my comments about her stinky feet have no jokey aspect; the kid is funky. Still, she takes every opportunity to turn my routine accusations about her odors back upon me, claiming that various parts of me are stinky, and that my very existence is olfactorily offensive. This is what I get for the jokes. This morning, I swiped her slippers off and ran them down to the laundry for a hot bath. I let the newly-sanitized booties dry on the radiator and fluffed them up with a hair dryer. They smelled of fabric softener sheets and terrycloth. We’ve placed them next to her bed, where she likes to see them in the morning; she’ll put them on tomorrow at dawn, before she does anything else. I give that terrycloth smell about three days, but she’ll call me stinky by 6:30 in the morning.

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We were talking about birthdays yesterday, and Kina remembered when she turned three and ate cupcakes at school with her friends. We have a video of that day, in which you can see Kina with her hair pulled back in a perfect ponytail, sitting silently at the head of a long, low table. She, like the ten other children around the table, has a cupcake on a little plate. The other children and her three teachers sing “Happy Birthday” to her as she absorbs the spectacle. The video ends with her face in the middle of the frame, all of three years old, serious but calm. Sometimes, when we talk about birthdays, she asks to watch that video. It makes her happy.

Kina didn’t have a birthday at school this year, because she’s had nothing at school this year. Her teachers celebrated her birthday in the morning meeting when she turned four, but there were no cupcakes, and she did not have a ponytail. Yesterday, when Kina was thinking about her third birthday, she asked if most kids had school birthdays, and I said yes, many do. (As the bearer of a summer birthday, I never did, which always made me envious of the other children. Now, it means I have a birthday in the best part of the year, and I want to go back and tell little me that summer birthdays are cool.) She asked if she would have a school birthday after COVID, and I said yes, she would, for sure. Later, when we were sitting at the dinner table, we were talking about something else that we missed—I can’t remember what—and she mused quietly, with confidence, “After COVID we’ll do it.”

Even though the school stuff is hard (and the birthday stuff, and the play dates stuff, and the grandparents stuff), Kina’s probably more patient that Laurea and I are about the slow decline of this pandemic. She trusts the end is coming, because we tell her it is, and so she is just keeping a little list in her head of the things that will happen “after COVID” (even when those things seem implausible): sleepovers, visits from teachers, home lunches with her stylist, play dates with friends, trampolines, rides on airplanes, visits from grandparents. Her list is not that different from our own, and so her confidence gives us a little hope about the things that we need, too.

When she was still a baby, I remember Kina trying to pull herself up by the bottom of our living room bookshelf. I placed a fragile little vase that we had bought in Japan up on a shelf next to the television, where Kina couldn’t reach it, and I never thought about it again. Today, she casually grabbed a remote (which she, quite charmingly, calls a “remoter”) from that same shelf and turned on the television. Somehow, she’s enormous, like Alice after the cake. Will she never stop growing? We have drawers full of clothes that are now too big for her, but we haven’t brought ourselves to get rid of them, because somewhere inside this giant child is the smaller child who will still fit into that Guerilla Girls t-shirt I bought at the PS 1 Art Book Fair when she was two. Somewhere here there is a little bottle that says “Drink Me”, right? I should look inside that vase.

A personal note from the editor: I am very nearly through the busiest work month of my entire life, which is why these have recently been shorter. Maybe you like that! Still, I look forward to actually spending time on these again, and I’m glad you’re reading them. We’re just talkin’ about noses over here, so we appreciate every subscription we can get.

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One of Kina’s smaller friends is moving to a new house this week, which has activated the part of her brain that realizes people don’t always stay in the same apartment for their entire lives. Now that she is enlightened, she has been walking around threatening to move to a new ice castle from her old ice castle, or to leave us behind in our current two-bedroom apartment to live in a “golden house”. A solid gold house is, I imagine, too expensive to contain the entire family, and so we must stay here in our normal brick-encased family box instead. Tragic, and so embarrassing.

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Laurea made scrambled eggs this morning, which is technically my domain, but I’m not complaining. She got super jazzed about a recipe in NYT Cooking that promised consistently perfect eggs and whipped up half a dozen first thing (note: they were, in fact, perfect, in a way that really threatened my sense of eggy dominance in the kitchen). We ate them in perfect golden mounds on toast, which is a great way to start a Tuesday, in my opinion.

Kina has gone through several egg phases in her short life, feasting on them for weeks at a time before dismissing them for long stretches. Each love affair with our scrambly friends is characterized by a particular niche obsession. In one month, she might demand a handful of Monterey Jack cheese be tossed in seconds before the eggs fully set. In another, she might ask that her eggs be showered with microplaned Parmesan. Lately, the demand is simpler—her eggs must be served piping hot.

At the table, seconds after the eggs land, she shovels them into her open mouth, expelling air and steam as she chews, gently burning the tip of her tongue. She foofs out little puffs of breath as the eggs approach her lips, closing her eyes in reverie and pain. Then, just seconds later, she deems the entire plate “too cold” and shoves it gently in the direction of her mother. The thrill is gone.

In the course of this pandemic, Kina has latched onto three Disney movies for her musical inspiration: Moana, in the early days, and Frozen and Frozen II in more recent months. These soundtracks have become the entirety of our musical experience in every way during lockdown, infiltrating our every waking moment (and many of our dreams) and dramatically influencing what music Spotify recommends to us. I swore I would never get into Disney soundtracks, but here I am, one year later, having memorized every lyric in Moana and become obsessed with the string harmonies of “Into the Unknown”, and I think I have to just admit that it’s fine and I’m a dad.

Kina usually has two songs from these movies that she favors for “performances” that occur multiple times a day—and whenever somebody is on video chat. Lately, those two songs are the aforementioned “Into the Unknown” and “Show Yourself”, both from Frozen II (which, for the record, is musically superior to Frozen, though I have watched neither movie and cannot comment on the plots). Drawing both on her repeated studies of the respective scenes from which these songs are taken and on her extensive life experience, Kina has assembled some pretty radical choreography for her renditions of both these songs. Her facial expressions alone are worth the price of admission, but the full experience of her gestures, mimed running, and jazz hands is really impressive—and consistent, largely, from performance to performance.

The actual structure of the “performance” is complicated, and can best be understood as a form of lip-synced cabaret. Kina occasionally sings, but very quietly, and has explained to me in the past that she’d “rather hear Elsa sing it”. As a reformed opera singer and karaoke fiend, this stings a little bit, but Idina Menzel is a legend, and so I can understand her point. What Kina does take pride in is the reproduction of specific shots from the film in her choreography—a well-timed stomp on the floor that sends frost shooting through the floor, running her fingers along an invisible wall of ice, or a carefree flip of her hair. Those moments, in particular, she has taken to calling out as her “favorite part”. She will pause briefly before performing them so that we pay closer attention, and they are in fact impressive.

It’s not entirely clear to me if Kina’s observation here is that I am the Daddy genius or that I am somehow the exception that proves the rule? I feel decisively not like a genius on most days, which has me leaning towards the non-genius case, but I know a lot more trivia about the environment and music than she does, which probably gives me genius vibes.

Kina, I would offer, is the real genius of this family, but I am her dad and could be overstating things.

The story comes fast and furious—a complex hero’s journey involving every protagonist and villain from each of Kina’s favorite tales: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the Octonauts, Princess Mononoke, Frozen, and Moana. In some versions of this story, the villain from one universe will fight the hero of another, but in today’s saga, all of the villains rallied behind She-Ra to subdue an army of skeletons. I can recall few details from the melee this morning—other than everybody eating pizza at the end—but it was an exhilarating (if exhausting) start to the day. Science fiction battle scenes are now Kina’s preferred genre; the storytelling years have begun.

I tell Kina long serial bedtime stories, making up the plot as I go—which is much, much harder than I expected it to be in my early fantasies of parenthood. I try to put together a reasonably cohesive episodic arc each night, but things eventually start to go sideways, so I tack on a cliffhanger and draw to a close. When she demands more, I tell her that I have nothing left and will need to dream about the next part of the story; this normally convinces her to let me leave the room, so that I can get on with the dream. Our latest dream serial revolves around Kitty Moon Fairy and her cohort of space thieves, who explore the universe in their rocket ship, rescuing squids. In the last five days, they have:

• Flown perilously close to the sun

• Visited Andromeda for a friend’s birthday

• Journeyed to the fictional planet of Etherea, where She-Ra treats them to a feast

• Had trouble finding the moon, which, as it turns out, does not stand still

• Took a bath after flying through the stinky clouds of Venus

Last seen in the back seat of Mochi Appley, Kina’s stalwart friend Simone the Owl reappeared after a prolonged absence this week, noting only that she had been on a leisurely vacation in Florida—a theory first advanced by Kina’s parents but never confirmed. The reappearance of Simone, a plush white stuffie recently discontinued by her manufacturer, came as a shock to Kina, her closest companion and confidante, who offered a short comment: “I thought she was gone for a long long time in Florida!” Simone, an owl who can no longer be purchased on Amazon, appeared to be in excellent health, rejuvenated by months of seaside living. Her fur, once ratty, was noted by close family members to be “pristine and shiny”, and she was said to have shed her once-pungent aroma. Kina immediately notified her stuffie council of Simone’s return, triggering an unexpected shuffle in leadership that resulted in Baby Rainbow Cat’s banishment to a nearby cardboard box. Simone, who closely resembles backstock owls available from reputable smaller toy retailers, sported a fancy new tag on her left wing; experts believe that the tag—since removed—helped Simone gain access to local shipping companies in Florida, aiding her eventual return. When asked to comment on Simone’s mysterious vacation, Kina’s mother, Laurea, said, “She had a great trip. She looks great. Who am I to question where she’s been?” When contacted by this publication, Simone—of whom there are three still in stock—had no comment.

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Kina’s grandma—my mother—is celebrating the last of the first pandemic birthdays in our family today, ensuring that each of us has now eaten a cupcake on video chat as we celebrate the passage of a year. Kina performed “Show Yourself” from Frozen II in celebration, and we followed with an encore of “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”—Grandma seemed to enjoy that, even though she has seen many of Kina’s performances before. Grandparents have a high tolerance for repetition, I have learned.

My mom was also the last grandparent to visit us in New York before the pandemic, during Kina’s birthday week in December of 2019. There is a video on my phone of Kina playing “ice cream” with me in the local playground as her grandmother looks on adoringly. It feels like several years ago—Kina had a different voice, demeanor, and hat size. Everything our parents have seen of her since then has been through photos, video chat, and this newspaper. She’s a different person now—like all of us, but even more so.

“Will I keep growing forever?” Kina asked us this morning at breakfast. Not forever, we replied, but for a long time you will. It’s not entirely true, of course—we do keep growing, but in different ways. I always remember the look in my mother’s eyes when she first held Kina in our living room two weeks after she was born; I’d known my mother for my entire life, but I had never known Kina’s grandmother. There was something in her then that had not been there before, a reflection of the person in her arms, who had also not been there before.

I don’t even know what to say about this one. I really just wanted it as the top headline so I could draw Kina standing on stilts while all of us wore top hats. Please take the time you might have spent reading a deeply philosophical five-paragraph essay and instead enjoy my detailed reproduction of “Jupiter 2 the stinging planet” and a drawn-and-quartered cheesy toast.

How’s your lifetime?

dad

You should have seen it—the sandwich was glorious.

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