By Mahlon Meyer
Northwest Asian Weekly
Homemade Pho made by Plum (Photo: Tanakas)
For Bill Tanaka, 24, living in his parents’ house during the pandemic has meant taking control of the kitchen when it’s his turn to cook.
“I’m very particular,” he said, describing putting whole cherry tomatoes into a frying pan to make a base for pasta sauce. “The pan cannot be cold when the food goes in.”
His father, Rick, described his son as a “very creative cook.”
“He has also cooked a lot of Asian food,” said Rick, 53, giving several examples, including Korean fried noodles and kimchi soup. “And he refuses to use any recipes, coming up with them out of his head.”
Such forays into gourmet cooking are an example of the new roles played by adult children when—facing their own struggles—they come to live with their parents again as a result of the lingering effects of the pandemic on the economy.
Nor are the Tanakas—who asked for pseudonyms due to the sensitivities of their grandparents—alone. Over 52% of adult children were living with their parents during the first year of the pandemic, according to a report by the Pew Research Center, a number that has no doubt increased given the stoppage of economic benefits paid during the onset of the catastrophe.
For the Tanakas, the return to their childhood home of both the son and his sister has meant an ongoing process of renegotiation of childhood roles that has resulted in some successes and some drawbacks, raising further questions about how families can navigate these changes.
At the same time, streaks of financial generosity, particularly involving the grandparents, of whom one set is Japanese American, complicates and enriches the picture.
Plum
The daughter, Plum, 22, was already living at the family’s cabin near Leavenworth, acting as a caretaker for her grandparents who had retreated there to avoid the pandemic. Plum would drive into Wenatchee to Safeway, Walmart, or Costco for supplies for the elder couple, who had spent a great deal of time with her when she was growing up.
“It’s cheaper to go to Wenatchee,” she said. “Leavenworth charges tourist prices.”
She enjoyed the solitude of the environs and took long walks with her dog daily along the Wenatchee River and in deep pine forests. When her parents, worried about her future, gave her an ultimatum to come home, she reluctantly complied.
“She was okay about coming home because she knew her grandparents had a caregiver to do the grocery shopping,” said Rick.
For her father, it was a boon. He had been working at home since the beginning of the pandemic while his wife worked long hours in the office as a tax preparer and auditor. She had just taken over the company, so her schedule was more grueling.
“Plum was sort of upset at first because she didn’t want to leave the cabin. It was a comfortable place for her,” said Rick, who works in IT. “But I was working at home so I was by myself all day every day. So having Plum move back was nice just to have someone else in the house.”
At the cabin, she had had ample time to learn how to paint and ended up painting the kitchen.
She also repainted the bathrooms in the basement and upstairs hallway in her parents’ home.
“I’m very detail oriented.” And she wants to do more.
“My parents’ bedroom is the same white it’s been for the past 25 years since they bought the house,” she said.
Her father, who had agreed to be interviewed separately and without knowing anything about the interviews done with his kids, said it would be difficult for her to do their bedroom.
“I don’t think she’s going to do more painting in the house. Instead, she’s going to focus on the cabin when she goes back up there,” he said. “But she really enjoys do-it yourself type work, and at the moment, she is demoing an exterior door so that we can have it replaced.”
Bill
Meanwhile, Bill was in Brooklyn several months before the pandemic started, where he had gone to jumpstart his way into the music industry.
Working at a Korean barbecue restaurant to support himself, he had barely started his search when the restaurant closed down and he was making several calls a day to the unemployment office. Not receiving any support, he went out to Long Island to live with his girlfriend’s aunt and her kids.
In order to make contributions to the household, he cooked Korean and Asian food for the family. At the same time, he learned the tastes of the family, which had lived for years in Italy, and he began to make special Italian dishes.
For one of these, the one he later made back in his childhood home, he put the cherry tomatoes directly into a hot frying pan and melted them down when he would add bacon and spices. For the pasta, he used a special kind known as “earlobe pasta,” which he described as “a hearty meal.”
After his unemployment benefits came through, he returned to Brooklyn and worked on remote and experimental music projects. But when the money ran out, along with his savings from working in the restaurant, he came back to his childhood home.
At his parents’ house, his girlfriend soon joined him.
Renegotiating roles
Hueiling Chan, clinical/case management director at Chinese Information and Service Center, spent two decades working with families.
She said parents and adult children living with them must be up front with their communications about changing roles.
“When adult children come home, the equation changes. Parents had the responsibility to take care of them when they were little kids. But now parents need to change their attitude and thinking so it’s not their responsibility. It’s a role change—if you continue to use the old ways, it won’t work,” she said. “It requires both sides to sit down and reexamine how they are going to work together and what ground rules are they going to follow. Do they do chores? Do they pay some of the rent? That’s the issue.”
In the Tanaka home, Rick’s wife, Janet, put up a large white board in the kitchen with days of the week for Bill, Plum, and Bill’s girlfriend to sign up for cooking.
Plum cooked the food she had learned how to cook in the cabin—Thai noodles and pho. Bill and his girlfriend, apart from Italian dishes, did cook some Asian fare. They discovered a way to use potato starch to cover tofu so it could be deep fried.
“We all started to come together for dinner—there were no expectations, it just happened naturally,” said Rick. “We talked about all sorts of things. Janet and I talked about our days at work, our struggles, our successes. Goofy stuff. Movies and music and silly things found on the internet and there was almost always some sort of conversation that referred back to the dog in some way.”
Rick also saw this as a family legacy. His kids had grown up with family dinners.
“I would like to think that the family values that Janet and I were raised with and the importance of family dinners that we were intentionally doing when we were raising the kids is now valued by them currently,” he said. “A different set of kids maybe will go and get takeout and go back up to their room, but here it’s appreciated, and it’s also a time where we all get together and talk about our days. It’s an enjoyable way to end the day.”
Plum and Bill took over shopping from their parents. And Plum found other ways to save money, such as learning to change the oil on her car herself.
Longings
But anxieties persisted.
After a year, Plum wanted to return to the cabin. She explained she had found a therapist that did telehealth, and she needed the space for personal growth—and for the sessions.
“When I first asked, they said no, but I go into my room and do what I need to do to calm myself down and figure out what I want out of the situation and what is the most effective way of trying to get my needs met,” she said. “I don’t want to work on the past, I want to work on the present.”
Eventually, her parents relented, so long as she could give them a time frame—three months.
“I’m much better up there, even my dog is better up there, he’s not so distracted by all the smells and noise when I take him for a walk,” she said. “Here, I was having to go and do my sessions in my car.”
Bill meanwhile was encountering his own issues with space. He had relished going back to his tiny Brooklyn apartment after being in Long Island for months.
“I have this thing about being home,” he said. But moving back to his parents’ house, and now with his girlfriend living with him in his childhood room, he is encountering space issues of a different kind.
Gourmet pizza made by Bill and his girlfriend, Debbie (Photo: Tanakas)
When his girlfriend, Debbie, needs space, he will vacate the room and find another space for himself in the house.
“There are a lot of spaces I can be in,” he said.
More recently, he and several members of his former band found a recording studio and a sponsor who invested so they could refurbish it. He now spends most of his daylight hours “working to keep the ship afloat.”
“I have a job, I’m just not getting paid,” he said—too modest to add the: “yet.”
Complicated feelings
Rick said the feelings of his children living in his parents’ house are complex.
Both Bill and Plum receive gifts from their grandparents that help them support themselves.
“I believe that there is some level of guilt in moving back home. For example their grandparents are very generous and are often gifting them with money and other things,” he said.
In Plum’s case, her grandfather bought her tools and other supplies. But they don’t take it for granted.
“They are very grateful for the gifts, and I don’t know if ‘embarrassed’ is the right word, but they definitely understand the value of the gifts, and they definitely do not take them for granted. You know, they’re not in a position where they’re thinking, ‘Grandma and grandpa are going to bail us out.’ That is the farthest from the truth,” he said.
Rick said this was part of a family value of being supportive to kids as they seek to find themselves and their passions.
“I think that we are letting them take this time to figure this stuff out on their own and not pressuring them in any threatening way,” he said. “There are often questions about what are you going to do, that sort of thing. But there has been no pressure that you must get a job by this date.”
Rick attributed this approach to his and his wife’s upbringing.
“Janet and I were both raised in very supportive but open families where there was not a lot of pressure to pursue some sort of prestigious career or go to a name brand school,” he said. “I think both of our parents believed that it was up to us to discover what we wanted to do.”
In fact, the Tanakas have been in this region for five generations. But Plum, especially, feels pressure, whether conjured from her own worrying or picking up on some innate frustration or anxiety of her parents.
Compared to her non-Asian friends who were living at their parents’ homes, she feels more pressure to get a job. She plans to go into interior painting or construction.
“I’m going to pay my parents back for their support,” she said.
Still, their father is aware of the challenges facing them that are perhaps greater than for any other generation in recent history.
“There’s no way you can live in Seattle these days unless you’re a software engineer and are making close to six figures,” said Rick.
Some studies of adult children living in their parents’ homes suggest that in some cases, children take on the role of emotional caregivers and do not get their own needs met. It is not clear if there are any elements of this in the Tanaka home, although Rick said that Plum was now giving him a lot of hugs.
Other studies have said that the pandemic has given fathers more time with their children, even as adults.
“I would have to say this is a very small silver lining of the pandemic. If the pandemic never happened, Bill may still be living in New York. Plum, would probably be living somewhere else. It’s more than likely that Janet and I would still be empty nesters and would not have reconnected with our kids. So that is something that I recognize,” said Rick.
For Plum’s part, she has also forged a new relationship with her brother.
Using the skills she honed at the cabin, she researched and found pristine spaces closer to home.
“I found this river in North Bend with rocks hanging over the water and we go out there and spend the day,” she said.
“That’s another silver lining—they’re reconnecting not only with their parents, but with their siblings,” said Rick.
Mahlon can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.
This health series is made possible by funding from the Washington State Department of Health, which has no editorial input or oversight of this content.