The Thanksgiving Day was my favorite day among other holidays when I was in the U.S. I remember that we celebrated the holiday with host family and prepared the turkey for our dinner, it is one of my cherished life experiences though the memory will be changed as time goes by. I love the gravy sauce with a turkey, and the stuffings are delicious with strings to tie the whole turkey and put it into oven for hours. Me and my Taiwanese friend who is a professor in University, invited me for Thanksgiving dinner with her American friend. The American friend is friendly to us, so we celebrated the warm holiday at his house and had the dinner together with his family. This was the first time that I saw American woman at the kitchen, and it reminded me of my mother. She showed me how to cook the turkey, from the cleanness to the whole puffy turkey with stuffings inside. Through the chat, I realized that the normal American is not so different than Taiwanese. The benign American woman with her son and two of foreign students from Taiwan on the Thanksgiving Day. Though their whereabouts is unknown to me now, I hope they are doing well now, and the kind mother could get away from the violent husband for the rest of her life. Without her, I will not understand how to cook the turkey and the following story cannot be continued.

The next year I moved back to Taiwan, so I did not continue celebrating Thanksgiving with them. But if you think my Thanksgiving Day was over, you are wrong. I took a break for a while, and I flew to Canada. It is the country where I met some Asian friends in the metropolitan city and shared the apartment with Japanese/ Korean. To be honest, the reason why I did not stay with Taiwanese is because Chinese harassment. But my Japanese friends did not let me down, they are shy but they helped me out sometime.

My second Thanksgiving dinner happened in Canada with my Japanese roommates. I know there are some differences between American and Canadian Thanksgiving, but I still followed my memory and the recipe that I Googled. I invited my Japanese friend to go grocery shopping with me, normally Japanese eat KFC on Christmas, so it was the first non traditional way of celebration for my friend. And I am not Canadian/ American, so I did not have confidence either. But we solved our problem by asking the staff at supermarket, and he seemed surprise when I asked him about turkey ingredients. So I gave him brief introduction about our intention, and background story. Our intention is to eat, that simple. After hours of cooking turkey, we have already starved for a long while, but it turned out very great !! I did make thick gravy, which is great. Now I could finally utilize the local supermarket.

This year, I ordered the roast chicken without stuffings from local chicken house; though the way of celebration is different, my heart toward this festive season will not change. I think Thanksgiving Day means a lot than Christmas, in Taiwan, we do not celebrate this kind of festival officially, but many people were traced back to other regions. Native Taiwanese, A-mei, have similiar celebration to thank God for the harvest year. Maybe in the future, we can create this kind of holiday in Taiwan for all citizens to appreciate this island for letting us have peaceful years from the war.

During this special season, I want to thank my family, for whom they are always being my spiritual props, and the current president Tsai, who keeps Taiwan safe from China even though Chinese aircrafts still harass our safety zone. Compared to the president Ma, Taiwan was facing the most darkest year with lots of Chinese agents; also some of American professors started to have the theory of abandoning Taiwan, which made overseas students to be strong on their own. Besides, I want to thank Mark who once raised me up from despair and handled my random compalints from being bullied. Last but not the least, thank my Japanese friends who were with me for not letting me isolated.

I love Thanksgiving Day, U.S, Canada, Japan and Taiwan.