What's in a Room

By Justine

“Our parents try their best to create the best environment for their children. But in the end, we'll all develop our own tastes. It's a rite of passage.”

Justine: What does your home look like? If you live in San Francisco, your house has probably some combination of small, old, or tall. Like mine is. We have a handful of architectural styles, whether you're in the Richmond, the Sunset, Pacific Heights, the Mission, Bayview, or the Haight, and more. You get the picture. Each house has its own personality.

What's inside a house can tell you so much about its owners. And if you're a kid, inside can say a lot about your parents. I went through a phase where I was really into princesses. So what did my room look like as a little girl? Well, it looked like a castle. There was a lot of light, and my mom painted all over the walls and put veils all over the place. It made me wonder what my mom's rooms looked like. It all started when she was about two years old.

Mom: My parents had graduated from medical school, and bought a house, so we moved across the country. When my brother was only an infant, and I was two.

Justine: My grandparents were both Chinese immigrants, and they had only lived on the East Coast during their time in America, before this. So by that time they were at Hopkins, in Baltimore.

Mom: So they, they drove across the country when I was two. And, that was a big trip for them. They went through Yellowstone park, there's pictures of you with a stuffed animal. And, they came here, and they bought an empty plot of land. And that's where they built the house together.

When we moved there, it was an orchard. So it was kind of funny, because the plot of land was in a circle—a spoke of a wheel. So everybody else built very super thin track homes. They had built this big, big track of homes and they had leftover land in the middle. And my parents built there, so everybody else could look into our yard.

It was really strange. So we were Chinese, in a suburban area, with this humongous house. It was weird. I had an Asian background, so we kind of stood out. I think people would come to our house, my friends would be like, our house is not what they lived in because all the other kids had track homes.

Justine: Everyone else's house looked about the same.

Mom: So I always grew up feeling a little bit like a weirdo. We definitely stood out. Like everyone would come to our house and I always think it was, really different and weird and huge.

Justine: So that's the outside. Maybe the inside was a little more normal? Well, before we get ahead of ourselves, what felt normal back then?

Mom: So there was a girl named Laura Cerruti. I remember she had a birthday party, so I went to Laura's house and they're very, in retrospect, really conservative Italian-American, and dad's a pediatrician and, nice people, but just really conservative in terms of appearance and lifestyle. So we went to their house. I remember I saw Laura's room. It was covered in white carpet, total white carpet. And she had all of these horses. So she had shelves, and all these horses, and a walk-in closet. And I went home with my mom and I was like, [gasps], they have the best house in the world, she has a carpet in her room, and she has all these horses.

And my mom was so offended because, her taste is a little different. She had, expensive tastes, but it was not… American taste, right? Probably like completely modern stuff. So you should have seen my room. And, she was really cheap, so we have my bedroom, she got a sofa from somewhere. I think it was Nai Nai's sofa.

Justine: Nai Nai is my great-grandma.

Mom: So she puts it in a room, and I had a bed. So the first thing that Popo Joyce did was she and Gung Gung were in New York at Bloomingdale's. They bought me a really nice quilted, Navy blue quilted bed cover with all these patchwork, it was really pretty. But then, Popo Joyce had this idea. She had to have everything match it. So she had a sofa from Nai Nai, it was not comfortable, and she put it in the room and she had a Navy blue cover made for it out of fabric. It did not look good. It was not comfortable for a kid. And then she thought, okay, I'm going to get matching wallpaper. So the wallpaper was white with blue polka dots, and they were little flowers. They were tiny little flowers. They were elegant, it was really expensive, but it just didn't go together well.

So the whole room was wallpapered white, with little flower polka dots. And then, because she's so practical and frugal, she didn't want to buy me normal furniture. So she went and got her medical cabinets, and put them all over the room. And then she wallpapered the cabinets with the same white. And then… this is what she did. My sofa wasn't blue, it was the reverse. So she thought it would be really cool, if the sofa was the reverse of the wallpaper. The sofa was navy blue with the white flowers, so the exact opposite. And then, I wanted a stuffed animal. I wanted a big, big Teddy bear. So she made me a big, blue whale, like the same navy blue. In retrospect, it's not a nice room for a kid.

Justine: My mom felt like her house and her room were completely out of the ordinary back then. So when she went to boarding school, when she was thirteen, choosing her own posters and decorations was really exciting. Sometimes it feels like there's negative connotation when it comes to changing your parents’ decorations, or creating your own taste.

But like I said before, rooms hold our personalities. My mom and my grandma just had different personalities. Blue, color-coded rooms aren't for everyone. And even in my idyllic princess room, I didn't feel satisfied. Our parents try their best to create the best environment for their children. But in the end, we'll all develop our own tastes. It's a rite of passage.