It’s true that you can get used to anything. I think this as I walk into the apartment building where this picture takes place. The stress of wet heat clings to me like another possession. Shriveled laundry hangs outside the building’s balconies, and dripping air con units stain the ground. August in Hong Kong means two things: heat and water.

I take the elevator up to the 19^th floor, where Annie, my Aunt Mabel’s Filipino maid, opens the two doors: the metal grille, which clanks and echoes through the hallway, and the wooden door inside, which gives a friendly squeak. I take my shoes off and the floor tiles are cool, although they stick a little to the sweaty bottoms of my feet. The folding table has been set up next to the normal dining table; two big pots of water are already laid out on stoves. Nearby, the evening news drones from the television, which is never silent. It’s a mid-sized family apartment for the city, so the common room serves as both living and eating areas, and the bedrooms are too small for either purpose. My cousin is sleeping on the floor in front of the TV. His pillow is the back of an enormous golden retriever we call “Gold Son.”

In this picture Aunt Mabel is standing in the back, the only person posing. Everyone calls her “big aunt” because she’s the eldest, and maybe because she’s the biggest in size and personality: a heavyset insurance agent in a pressed suit and gold jewelry. In the picture she’s standing behind my uncle, the youngest, with her hands on his shoulders, maybe in the middle of a massage, and a natural air of possession. At times this authority is reassuring, a shield between me and the rest of the shouting, yanking city. At other times it’s another thing that hems me in. When I arrived at her house my first night in the city, she looked me up and down and immediately declared I had lost weight and looked better off for it. The week after that she took a hank of my hair in her hands and said it was rough and badly in need of an oil treatment, would I like to try the brand that she used? But my family is like that: familiar, practical, eagle-eyed.

My father has three sisters and one brother. His father died before I was born, but his mother lived through the war in China and moved to Hong Kong, where my father grew up. His older sister, young brother, their spouses, and my grandmother are in this picture, but my grandmother has five children and twelve grandchildren, so any family picture is an ordeal. My father is the only one who moved out of Hong Kong, all the way to America, although he comes back every year.

They are a clan of sorts. He calls them, proudly and wistfully, “the gang.” Every time he says it, something childlike flickers across his face and I am moved. My parents stayed in America for me. My aunts and uncles are all married, but they have adopted their spouses into the family. The spouses’ families, perhaps more typical of the present culture, hover loosely on the fringe and make an occasional appearance. The Yeung clan is the nucleus, jealously contained within itself, and my grandmother is its silent, unassuming matriarch.

Mostly they eat. Sometimes they travel together, but even in foreign countries the activity of choice involves sumptuous spreads, magnificent repasts, sensory delights – call them what you may. It’s a fixation evocative of Hong Kong culture, but I think of the Yeung clan as the distillation of the city, in all its humming joy and friction. On weekends the entire population crams into the dim sum restaurants. On an island peninsula with nowhere to go but up, a lavish amount of space is devoted to these places, which often span multiple floors.

My second aunt, who is not pictured, lives in a multi-family townhouse in a nearby town, where they often barbecue on the rooftops. Those nights, thick white smoke rises in pillars from the roof, and the air smells like burnt meat and honey. On a low, square table next to the drinks, my aunts and grandmother will wash a broken snake of white mahjong tiles. They sound like beads falling. My cousins will whoop and joke around the grill. Some of them will sit on cement blocks, jabbing the coals or fanning newspapers, holding the sharp sticks as close as they can to the flames.

They eat in placid, companionable silence, punctuated by the details of everyday life, in the deep silence of self-absorption, in the sullen silence bred of familial resentments. They eat not in silence at all but raucously, the table clattering with the uneven weight of moving plates and banging fists. The noise of the television is a permanent soundtrack in the background. Outside, thousands of tiny, glimmering windows light the high rises.

Hot pot, what’s pictured here, is something else. My uncle, in the middle, works and lives in mainland China during the week. When he comes home he wants hot pot, a hodgepodge of meats and vegetables cooked in hot broth, traditionally in cold weather. He comes home – short, bald, shiny – and bellows for air conditioning. It’s cranked up high, sputtering with the effort, but the cold air streams out like water and instantly dries the room. “So cold it makes me dance!” my cousin sings, doing a jig.

When the pot of water is oiling and the plates of ingredients are snugly gathered around, each person throws in their own ingredients. It’s a festive, chaotic free-for-all. At the peak of this giant stew, the steam rises in big clouds and mingles with the stream of cold air coming from the ceiling. It creates a pleasant prickle of moisture on my skin that must be just beginning here, as most of the plates and bowls are still full. There’s the brick red slices of beef my uncle’s arm is blocking on the left. Going counterclockwise, bowls of minced garlic, chili, and Chinese celery, the soy sauce blocked behind the pot. Before we start cooking, we pass these around for each person to put in their own saucers, releasing fragrances hot and tangy and fresh all at once. The fish balls at my grandmother’s elbow are the perennial favorites, the Chinese equivalent of chicken nuggets.

My uncle has a way of being at once belligerent and ridiculous, the sign of a master imitator or a poker player. He complains and jokes at the same time, gesturing dramatically with his hands and his eyebrows. In the picture his whole face expresses surprise, eyes wide and his mouth hanging open. When I called for attention, he was deep in the fragrant reverie of the dinner, a pleasure he must dream about in the company housing he shares with his coworkers, far from home. There are always the last stragglers around the table, when most people have migrated to the couch to watch the soaps in a dazed contentment. But my uncle lingers. Out of all of us he savors this ritual the most, from pristine, bubbling broth to the last, mealy noodles.

To the right of my uncle, in the lime green shirt, is my aunt, a former dance instructor. Now she works for a business in the mainland too, but she still looks far younger than her age, and every night she comes home I marvel at how far she can travel in her strappy stilettos. In the picture you can see the small compression of a smile, the smile of a town sweetheart who married the class clown and never looked back. Later, my uncle will call her back, both wheedling and commanding. He needs someone to keep him company, be last with him. She’ll sigh about this to the general audience, roll her eyes, and stay at his side.

On the far left is Big Uncle, the only face you can’t see. The thin white undershirt he wears at home shows a little paunch of a stomach and Bermuda shorts bag around his skinny legs. His bushy, graying eyebrows and slightly crotchety silence counterpoints my aunt’s personality. He doesn’t seek out interaction with me, but he pays for my bills.

This is the third time I have seen my extended family. When you live too far for frequent travel or even phone calls to be feasible, you have to catch up all at once in the time you have. You get a lifetime’s worth of practical advice and Chinese New Year money. You’re the center of attention at every meal. You fend off probing questions which would have been asked in the natural course of time, but family history has to be made on demand. You’re also both an exotic curio and a reporter from a distant land. I struggle to convey my answers in Chinese, my first language and the language of my childhood, but not my present. It’s the language I’ve forgotten and English is the language I’ve learned.

The same comparison applies to my family in Hong Kong, to a lesser extent. I already know them as an extension of my parents, whose stories and personalities have crafted parts of the family identity. Here I piece everything together. I find my father’s tenable spirit in my grandmother, who at 72 has outlasted wars and revolutions, and marches the streets like a conqueror. I trace my mother’s fearless sense of glee in my Aunt Gladys, whose new suitcase is Pepto-Bismol pink. When my mother took university night classes, she would crack open boxes of congee or noodles and the hot, savory smell would fill the whole room. Her classmates would look at her incredulously while her professor kept on lecturing.

I see the arc of their persons in the city itself, in the back-and-forth, sharpshooter banter on the streets. In the intense employment of the senses in the steam-filled, clinking ritual of rinsing your dim sum utensils with tea. In the bakeries, where trays of pastries like hot golden coins slide out straight from the oven. I see these things and they become part of my own identity.

 I took this picture from the couch. And then I got up and took it again from the vantage point of the television, because pictures, like families, are captured over and over from different angles, different facets, until the whole gem can be seen.

They take care of each other. Everyone knows everyone’s business. People harp and criticize each other. Quarrels over everything from money lending to entrance exam scores to which restaurant to hold a banquet at. The aunts and uncles discuss the next generation – their university prospects, the job market. The older cousins talk about the younger cousins – the naturally gifted and the industrious, the lazybones. You live life under close watch here. It is one from which you can’t escape, so you squirm a little under its bright light and critical eye. But it is also a cradle, it is home, people who will take you for granted when no one else will take you in.

 Halfway across the world, I understand my father’s longing for home. I understand him best when I look at my grandmother. She’s in mid-bite in the picture, mouth open and chopsticks frozen in their movement. Much of the time I spend with her is at mealtimes, as she is the cook of the house. I will grow accustomed to her rhythms and quirks, the way her chopsticks wander across the dishes of food, pick up a snatch and consider it, flinging any unwanted portions off like laundry. I learn the tones of her sighs, whether she is irritated, satisfied, exhausted. We sleep in the same narrow twin bed, each person’s feet at the other’s head. I wake her up when I climb into bed late, and she wakes me up when she forgets her bed is not her own and rolls over in the middle of the night. I learn her stories as best as I can, she tells me about my grandfather who sold paintings on the street, and her childhood in China.

She will not speak much about her past. She is firmly, obstinately practical, and does not dwell on what cannot be changed. I learn this, and I learn to love her as my father does. I am the reason he stayed in America, and she is the reason he goes back to Hong Kong. So I keep myself with her, and the city, in order to understand him. We cross oceans to understand each other.