电视屋
Living room
The living room: home to couches, televisions, fireplaces and the various other knick knacks of life.
Interestingly enough, this room doesn’t see much living on a day-to-day-basis. Most of the time spent here has been staring at the TV instead. It seems worthy to call it a television room instead. But there are some other objects worth taking a look at.
Part 1: The couches
The living room has two couches. They’re never new, passed down from other friends or shuffled over from adjacent couch-ed rooms. And if my memory serves me, this living room has now gone through three pairs by now.
The first pair is now muddled in memory, but they did feel incredibly soft. The kind that would break your back if you laid down for too long. Jumping on these as a toddler was much fun. I tried jamming a variety of limbs (ranging from my head to a leg) and pretended to be swallowed up by the void.
At some point, this couple left and was replaced by a firmer pair dressed in blazingly artificial orange leather. They served for a long time. Most of my childhood was surrounded by these orange folk, yet somehow I can’t find a single picture of them.
The current ones were passed down from the neighbours when they moved away. They’re softer & more modern, though far from what I’d call well-designed. The grey leather sticks out like a sore thumb in a mostly warm room. But that’s the charm of this place: always elegantly a bit out of style.
Part 2: The Fireplace
Once upon a time, this fireplace fizzled and cracked with life. Lao ye loved a hearty fire and lit them regularly through the winters. You’ll find me sitting right beside it, like a cat drawn to the sun.
Dad promptly sealed it shut after Lao ye went back to China, citing the ember burn marks on the floor as one of many motivations. I was terribly disappointed. But in retrospect, it was a miracle that my Chinese immigrant family would ever use an American fireplace. Since then, its doors remain shut as more trinkets are piled on its stone shelves. Some plants, a photo of me playing soccer, and a brass statue affixed to a clock stuck at 8:04 (am or pm?). Who knows what else will be added to the pile.
The gold trim still confuses me. Why gold and pink brick out of all pairings? And with mom’s plants on top, the whole concoction looks nauseating from afar. Sometimes I think that the design is so bad, I start wondering if they decided to do it on purpose. Maybe the fireplace is just designer furniture I don’t understand?
If you look closely, the brass statue clock was still stuck at 8:04
Part 3: The TV
A TV has always sat in the northwest corner, periodically engulfing the room with more black pixels as the years trudged along. At first it was a tiny CRV. Then a 42 inch, then a flat screen, and now the behemoth LG smart TV slumbers in place. It’s barely even used anymore. With the grandparents gone, all we do is look at smartphones.
If you were to ask me, I would replace the whole thing with a vinyl hi-fi setup. But alas, my parents still hold on to this ancestral piece of technology as if it’s still relevant in the modern age.