Upon arrival home from one of her weekly sessions with her psychiatrist, my sister announced totally straight-faced, “My therapist says we’re dysfunctional.”
I didn’t know how to take this and neither did my parents and my other sister, who were all aware of this fact without the aid of professionals. After all, we’re dysfunctional, not deluded. But the thing was, half of us weren’t listening and half of us couldn’t understand English, so we didn’t acknowledge her dramatic broadcast.

Upon arrival home from one of her weekly sessions with her psychiatrist, my sister announced totally straight-faced, “My therapist says we’re dysfunctional.”
I didn’t know how to take this and neither did my parents and my other sister, who were all aware of this fact without the aid of professionals. After all, we’re dysfunctional, not deluded. But the thing was, half of us weren’t listening and half of us couldn’t understand English, so we didn’t acknowledge her dramatic broadcast.
Admittedly, the notion of dysfunctional families popularized in shows like Arrested Development and movies like Little Miss Sunshine has an entertaining — even loveable — spin to it. However, it’s one thing to watch as disaster after disaster occur comically on a screen and it’s another to experience actual disasters every day of my life. From where did all this dysfunction originate? And if I could find it, how could I even begin to attempt to fix it? Was I even looking at my family from the right angle?
What a no-brainer that I turned to genetics for an answer. My mother resembles Lois from “Malcolm in the Middle” — hot-headed and unreasonable. This very same mother once told me she could have been a Chinese opera singer when she was younger. I believe her, because that’s how she talks — her voice shrill and clear, always dragging the last syllable of a statement as long as possible. I wince every time I hear that prolonged “Ai yaaahhhhhhh!” set off by the most trivial of things.
Although you never would have known that she has a hindering illness from her powerful voice, her actions give her away. She sits on the couch, passively folding colorful paper roses and pineapples, sad and sagging like the cushions. No matter how much of a struggle it is for her to perform simple activities, she still manages the daunting feat of holding our family together.
My father is a completely different story. His only resemblance to token paternal characters on television like Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin is that they all have protruding bellies. Unlike these characters, he doesn’t see himself as an American, but rather a Chinese man living in America. As an outsider looking in, he told me out of nowhere that he was going to go back to his motherland to die. Adamant about staying true to his heritage, he frequently bans English from being spoken in the house, often leaving the family in suspended silence.
In the event that we do talk, the dialogue sounds less comic and with more consequence than the hilarious movie lines we love so much to quote. Whereas in Little Miss Sunshine, the clever son would demand, “Everyone, just… pretend to be normal,” in my house, a common one-liner is “Did you get fired today?”
Although our communication skills are drastically different from those in Sunshine, there are certain aspects of Hollywood’s perception of a dysfunctional family that resemble my family. Just as the characters typically come to a compromise at the end of a sitcom, my parents learned to accept difficult situations. Despite having their disappointments, my parents didn’t object when my sister changed career interest from an artist to an astrophysicist to a software engineer, nor did they give a lecture to my other sister when she dropped out of community college — twice. In my case, my father, tired and weary from work, doesn’t complain when he drives me all the way home from school at 11 p.m. due to journalism late nights.
Before I came to understand my unique family, I watched The Brady Bunch. To me, the Bradys were a model of how all families really behave in the 21st century, with the single exception of my own. As I grew older, it finally dawned on me that the sanity in families was not as easy to define as those with fixed storylines.
Yet, the opening lines of the Brady theme song, “Here's the story of a lovely lady, who was bringing up three very lovely girls” still holds true for my family.
We are tragedy after tragedy strung through DNA strands, strands that cannot be broken, strands that don’t need to be fixed. We are a beautiful disaster.