I’m on the ferry headed home. As we weave between islands, my eyes scan the Sound for any signs of dorsal fins, for larger than usual splashes amongst the choppy waves, perhaps of Tahlequah once again carrying around her dead calf, J61. The first time, in 2018, she had carried her dead calf for more than 17 days and for 1,000 miles. But I don’t have binoculars, and I am, as usual, in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
“What’s that?!” Lucas jokes and looks out into the water, as I transfer Sylvie to him so that they can prance around in the passenger deck, and I can sit in the car. I shoot him a glare then burrow in the car with my napping dog, Barley, staring into the thick fog that shrouds the islands until they look like faded photographs. The water today is a light green, mixed with ice blue, smeared with white pastel. It’s the color of cold, of grief and reincarnation.
At the start of our mini family vacation, I didn’t even hope to see an Orca, or any whale (or killer whale), in our few days in the San Juan Islands. It was winter, after all, and all the Facebook posts from the Orca-watching community spotted the pods in Puget Sound, closer to Vashon or Whidbey or the islands near Seattle—ironically, where we left, where I’d never in my day-to-day have the time to look out into the water and think about endangered killer whales, or about much of anything besides work and when Sylvie sleeps and what we eat and is that a moldy smell in our house?
And yet, each day on our vacation, I’d still skim the Facebook group to see people chime in the threads with where they spotted the whales, and where they thought they were heading; new eyes picked up where former ones left off and commented, as the pods traveled north or south, milling or moving. People posted photos of their encounters, of the processions of black and white giants, jumping, playing, pushing through, or in Tahlequah’s case, mourning.
On New Year’s Day, as Lucas rocked Sylvie to sleep, news of Tahlequah’s latest loss on New Year’s Eve had spread and I found myself refreshing my phone repeatedly, reading comments, looking for photos. A mother drawn to a mother, grief drawn to grief. “Maybe she doesn’t have enough milk,” a comment read, amongst a sea of people lamenting the lack of salmon, pointing out it was her second loss. I thought back to how I had no milk when Sylvie was cut out of me. How they had run the breast pump over and over, squeezing me all day for dribbles, not taking emptiness for an answer. I am a mother after all, shouldn’t I be able to feed my child who was constantly shrieking at us from hunger? Finally, one of the nurses offered us formula—yes, yes yes, I had said, not wanting my child to starve to death.
I heard Lucas play “Rock-a-bye Baby” and cried when I read about Tahlequah, how she continues to snatch back her calf from the waves before it is swept away. She pushes its body, weighing hundreds of pounds, with her head, sometimes carrying it between fin and teeth. It weakens her, but how can you let go when you had hope for a new start?
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.
The ferry is arriving in Anacortes, and the horizon still stretches out, somehow empty yet full. An announcement crackles through the loudspeakers to take our belongings with us. I consider what I want to take with me into this new year. I consider Tahlequah, who takes her calf through and through; though the world once again grieves with her, to her, it is just her and her child, as she confronts the waters minute by minute.
---
I took with me Sylvie’s stuffed animals (she picked three for the trip) and placed them on her belly. She hugged them tight and asked me to rock her. There was no rocking chair so I strung her across my arm and lap, and rocked my body back and forth on the bed. Then she wanted me to put her in her Pack ‘n’ Play (which she is too large for). Then to rock her again. Then to put her on our bed. Then to rock her. Usually I would draw a line, but as I hugged her tight while she hugged her stuffed animals tight. I could still feel her fever burning under and through her skin. It was coming down, but barely, with the alternating use of Tylenol and Motrin.
“Poor Sylvie.”
Her fever had started on the first night of our vacation. For those first few nights we barely slept. After she cried every 20 minutes, I had carried her into bed with us. It was our first time co-sleeping. It was nice to feel her body cuddled against mine. Until there was a kick to the uterus or a piercing scream right in my ear. She was angry to be awake. She was angry she was not feeling well. She was angry angry angry.
And we were so exhausted.
During the mornings we would go on walks in the wind, in the drizzle, in the cold. Sometimes the sun would hit us. And everything would set her off—not being carried, being carried, being in her car seat, not wanting to eat, the wrong sock, or for reasons I just couldn’t figure out. Tantrums for her, and any toddler, were normal, but the frequency of them during the trip and the need for us to be just hardly, constantly, one step ahead of a meltdown sucked the life out of me and Lucas. We could barely get a complete sentence to each other that wasn’t about caretaking or planning the next step.
“This is too hard,” I said to Lucas, after Sylvie finally settled down again for the night. I’m not meant to be a mother. Wait, did I say that part out loud? He opened a bottle of wine. It was New Year’s Eve. We had intended to celebrate.
“You’re a good mom. We are good parents.”
I sank into the couch as he asked me about the best and worst moments of 2024.
Sylvie swimming, dancing, stomping.
Meltdowns at a wedding.
Getting a massage child-free.
All the times she was sick.
Eating in Vancouver.
There were always highs and lows, the pull of each tide shaping coastal ecosystems.
Gravity, Sylvie had learned and echoed this past year in her toddler-speak, is when things fall down. Then she would drop a stuffed animal, or her food.
I would chuckle, then pick it back up.
---
I took with me a bag of a dozen oysters, High Beach Sweets harvested in Westcott Bay, into the car. With almost all the restaurants closed for winter break, I was most excited about getting fresh oysters straight from the farm. And lucky me, within the four days we were there, they’d be open for three hours on New Year’s Eve.
We drove back down Westcott Drive, admiring the quirky and PNW-themed mailboxes along the way.
“I’m still worried about the Norovirus outbreak,” I told Lucas. Just after placing my order, I had read news of Norovirus outbreaks in oysters found in Washington and British Columbia. “This should be fine right?” I asked, knowing he couldn’t answer it. “They were other companies and other bays and other farms that were affected. Right?”
I stare at the bag of white, gray shells, covered in ice. I had imagined enjoying them with a glass of white wine. I had imagined embracing the definition of chill for once. I had even brought our shucker with us on the trip, just for this moment.
And yet, when we arrived back at the condo, before Lucas had helped me shuck the whole dozen, I examined each one to make sure they were closed shut. And after he had shucked them, I examined each muscle, valve, gill, every bit of flesh and liquor for … what would Norovirus even look like? Poop maybe? Did this one look funky, like it had too much grit? My anxious nature took over and I threw one away for good measure.
“Whatever, it’ll be okay,” I said, but did not believe. I spooned some vinaigrette onto an oyster and slurped it down. Refreshing, cold, salty sea hit my tongue and down my throat. Nothing tasted off, but then again, how do you know?
Lucas ate one, his one “meat of the year,” he called it as a vegetarian. The rest were up to me.
I ate all fresh but three, willing myself to enjoy each one—because they were so good. Then somehow, I got it in my brain that I had to cook the last three, you know, to decrease the odds of me getting Norovirus. But we had no grill, and the condo kitchen had no oil or butter or condiments, and my shellfish’s shelf life was quickly expiring. So I threw the last three in boiling water and immediately regretted my decision.
I watched the beautiful oysters, plump and full of life, shrivel and turn opaque.
I ate each of them, chewing for far too long, hoping no one would ever know, and hoping that maybe in 2025, I will 1) not let anxiety ruin enjoying the moment and 2) not get Norovirus.
---
We took with us the hiking backpack, which Sylvie was also outgrowing, her head butting up against the sun and wind shield, Lucas grunting as he swung it and her across his back.
Over the last two years she had napped in it, laughed in it, pointed out trees and animals in it. Older couples often stopped us in our trails to mention how they had fashioned one just like it before for their kids, before there were so many babywearing options on the market.
On our last day on San Juan Island, Sylvie’s fever was gone and she was finally eating again. We hiked up to the Cattle Point Lighthouse. It was smaller than the Lime Kiln one, with grassy dunes stretching across for miles. Eagles soared. Birds chirped. It had even stopped raining.
“There might be foxes,” I said. And before I knew it, Sylvie became obsessed with the idea of seeing a fox. Not wanting to let her down, I told her they were likely sleeping or hiding from the cold.
For most of the walk, there was no one in sight. Just me, and Lucas, and Sylvie, and Barley. When we got to the lighthouse, we peered down the edge, against glacier-carved rocks and into the stunning Salish Sea. Can’t believe the Americans and British almost went to war over a pig, I thought. Or actually, I can. We were always at war, there was always violence and grief.
“Sylvie, let’s try to be quiet and just listen,” I said. Sylvie immediately stopped asking about foxes, intrigued by the exercise. So just for a minute, we stood there, tiny specks to nobody. The quiet washed over us. Then we heard the waves lapping, the birds singing, the wind howling. It was just for a minute, but it was all we needed.
This morning, I listened to Kina Grannis' new album for the first time while I was spooning oil onto a frying egg. Pan-frying an egg just the way I liked it was an act of care and tenderness I had practiced over time, ensuring that both sides of the egg would cook without having to flip it over, without the bottom burning.
When "I Never Wanted Anything More Than I Wanted You" came on, I was already bawling.
I try to think lightly, picture the lines
And hope that the feeling sticks.
The irony of cooking an egg and thinking about my eggs wasn't lost on me. I placed the pan flat again and let the oil run back down and around the pan to even out.
I feel you in the sea, washing over me
Something in the movin' tides
Every fallin' leaf seems to say to me
‘Evеrything in time.'
I turned off the heat. The yolk sat hidden right below the surface, ready to be punctured.
---
We were walking around Carkeek Park, where fall was in full color. Leaves were in gorgeous shades of reds, golds, yellows, oranges, like tiny fires dotting the forest and the skies, branching over the Sound. Fall made dying look beautiful.
I wanted to look for salmon, to see if I could spot any spawning, any coming home and fighting the flow of water to make eggs and dig their nests. Whenever there was a clearing to glimpse the river, we stopped and looked up and down the stream. Maybe I was too late, or too early, or maybe their changed bodies were removed before they could fully decomposed. Maybe I was not looking hard enough.
Lucas asked if we were going to do the fire today. I had been thinking about it all day too, this morning's songs never left my mind, but I hadn't asked him out loud yet. It was a nice feeling, that feeling that we were again on the same page, without even talking about it.
"Yes, let's do it today before it rains."
---
About three weeks ago, I had folded paper origami of a few baby items. Onesies, a pair of shoes, butterflies that reminded me of beauty and change and ephemerality, lotuses that symbolized rebirth, purity and light floating above murky waters. Lucas and I both had also written a letter each ourselves to the hope, the "you" that we had so briefly come to know until it was gone. We named it so that we could honor it. We named it so we knew how to refer to it in the future. We named it because we loved it.
In so many cultures like my family's, a miscarriage is not to be talked about, not to be named. It was a baby who didn't choose you. So I named it because I wanted it to be louder and more defined than the guilt that centuries of women were told they should feel, that maybe we did something wrong or ate something wrong. Maybe we said something wrong. I wanted to transfer all of that rage and hurt into another form.
Whenever someone died in my family, we would burn offerings for them. Ghost money. Paper belongings. Things to help them in the afterlife before they began their journey to become reincarnated. We would say their names so that they could find it.
I couldn't find a ritual or anything similar for pregnancy losses, so we decided to make our own based on the fires of my upbringing. A process of offerings, but more so for us, of healing.
So today, Lucas got a fire going in our back yard, and one by one we watched as each origami turned into ash. Smoke wafted up and clung to our coats, our hair, seeping into our pores, hitting the darkening sky in a rising gray cloud. We each read our letters. Then we hugged each other and cried.
"I didn't know how much I wanted a baby," he said.
I never wantеd anything more than I wanted you
I never wanted anything more than I wanted you
Come back to me
Come back to me
I never wanted anything more than I wanted you
---
Dear Quince,
You were a gestational sac, uncertain if you were really there. At seven weeks and five days, they said, we should have seen more.
Scientifically maybe you were barely there. But emotionally, in ways that make humans feel and dream, you were an undeniable presence and gift. Thank you for bringing us hope and small moments of joy.
We may have never met you and you us, but we loved you already — so fast and early and unquestionably.
We wanted to say goodbye in one of the only ways I knew how growing up, through fire, a burning of offerings, a ritual of beginnings and endings.
The day we realized you were gone, jars of quince had arrived from Lucas' dad from California, grown in his backyard, which he talked about for months. We decided to name you after Quince because of the sweetness and vibrancy of membrillo. And the love both of our families have for fruits.
Every time we eat some, or see one growing on a branch, we will think of you.
We went to a Lunar New Year food walk on Saturday morning, picking up foods and drinks at a few restaurants in the Chinatown-International District, crossing the street to create space between us and other people, eating in our car, sanitizing, sanitizing, sanitizing.
A rare bustling moment in a year of quiet but monstrous grief.
We surpassed 500,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States today. 500,000 empty seats and empty spaces. Clothes without bodies, belongings with nowhere to belong, the living grieving into the emptiness of a dead loved one's mug or the vacant inside of their shoe.
A dare to celebrate and support local businesses without getting too close.
There's an alarming surge of anti-Asian violence. My Instagram feed asks me constantly, what are you doing about it? How are you helping?
While we waited outside a Vietnamese place that served mostly vegan food, people wandered the strip mall parking lot, some crouched together in corners, a man changed out of clothes once tucked in old plastic bags, a woman paced the sidewalk yelling at nobody. A man came up to us. "Hello, how are you doing?" he said. I didn't know how to respond. My first instinct was fear, because I didn't know what it was that he wanted, what would follow the question, and maybe I didn't want to know. So I didn't respond. No one responded. And the moment passed. As he walked away, I felt a wave of shame.
Inside the small hole-in-the-wall and behind the register was an older couple standing side-by-side, prepping the food. Behind them was a sign offering free meals to homeless people on Sundays. Another wave of shame. The inside of their restaurant, closed to dining in, was decorated with Buddha art and statues.
She handed us each a fried veggie spring roll as a bonus. "For you, enjoy."
The next morning, I listened to the last episode of the "Outsiders" podcast on unsheltered homelessness, in which a woman in her thirties named Jessica in Olympia wanted it all to end because she felt like nothing she was doing was working, that she was trapped, that she could not be with her daughter. In the very first episode, she was excited for new beginnings.
New beginnings. That's what Lunar New Year is about. Since I was young my mom would sprinkle little myths and symbols of good and bad luck. Don't cut your hair so you don't sever connections. Don't wash it either so you don't wash your fortune away. Sweep, sweep, sweep away the evil spirits. Lucky foods enter our mouths and lucky words come out. Good luck is pouring down on you. I picture it running down my hair and flowing down my body. Cleansing.
Reflect on the old year, wash it, and start anew.
This year is the Year of the Ox, my grandmother's year. A huge part of me avoids calling her unless it's a big holiday, because I don't want to go through the same questions, I don't want to know how much she's forgotten.
While debating when I should call her for the new year, my aunt's video chat popped up on my phone and decided for me. Talk to your ama.
Xing nian kuai le. Gong xi fa cai. And good health. Aunty, I ask, how do I say I wish you good health?
Jia ba bue? I always say in Taiwanese. Have you eaten? What did you eat?
My grandma lists what she ate, chicken, fish, they had hot pot the night before.
"What's your name again? What's your husband's name again?"
I showed her our dog Barley and she said he looks at her with big eyes. Then she asks when I'll have a baby.
This conversation happened on Christmas too. Have you eaten? Where do you live now? What's your husband's name again? When will you have a baby? Come over sometime and let's walk together. Gia gia.
It always ends with her asking me to visit and take a walk with her. It always ends with some nod to the future, to a future meeting.
I will, I always say. I will soon. When it's safe.
When I hang up, I sit in a grieving process I had already started years ago. The loss of my father's mother, a woman whose piercing cry from losing her first child still rings in my mind. A woman I shared a room with for much of my childhood, who told me to watch more TV so I could learn how to read Mandarin like how she did, a woman my mother said fit the zodiac of an ox so well. Stubborn, strong-headed. Those born in the Year of the Ox will walk down the road they choose until the end.
I don't think I've ever been able to let go and let new. There's been so much to grieve collectively it can be paralyzing sometimes. But I think forward to a day when we can walk together again, down whichever road my grandmother chooses.
In the same week I learned to fold dumplings through a virtual class (hosted by a mom and daughter duo), I learned my mom had never voted in a U.S. election.
“Remember to vote!” I texted my family.
“I don’t like politics,” my sister said, the same person who had been complaining about the president every day.
“Wait, did you not register yet?! Did mom?”
My zero-to-rage meter shot up faster than usual, and I panic-googled the registration deadlines for Nevada.
I had never questioned that my mom wouldn’t be registered. She had seen me go canvassing in high school before I could even vote. Other canvassers would knock on our door at home when I went to college. But I should’ve known--I didn’t grow up in a household that talked politics. (When do you talk politics, between the rush of my parents going to work and caring for us? How do you talk politics when there’s a language barrier, when what I learned about the political and governing systems through school seemed so distant to their lived reality?)
I was texting voters in different states about their voting plans, trying to get disinterested voters to believe that their vote counts (”vote your values,” “there’s so much at stake--the pandemic, health care, systemic racism, the climate crisis”), but I had overlooked my own family.
“I’m too old to vote,” my mom said.
I had to tell her most voters were older, and what she thinks still matters.
“Do we have to register for a party? Do you have to vote for everything?”
You don’t have to, I said. The anxieties around making a political opinion, around giving information away was palpable and understandable. And no one had ever explained the way voting works to her, the deadlines, the mailing process.
In the conversation, in a very messy mix of English and Mandarin, I was also trying to ease the same anxieties passed down to my sister.
In the dumpling class, the daughter said that when she was having a hard time folding as a kid, she would just press the edges together as hard as she could. Whatever you do, even if it doesn’t look pretty, you just press them together hard to get a tight seal to avoid the filling from leaking out later.
With each fold, I was thinking, press and hold, press and hold, like what you learn to do to stop the bleeding.
“Okay, we’ll register tomorrow.”
“Okay, I’ll call you again tomorrow then.”
I called them back the next night. She repeated the same anxieties, and I gave her the same reassurances.
When you gently place the dumplings in a pot of boiling water, all you can do is wait and see and hope it doesn’t break open.
She gave my sister her I.D., and both of them registered that night.
The dumplings floated to the top, the same lesson I’d learned from both my parents over and over again. You wait, and they’ll float to the top when they’re ready.
Check on those around you. Remind them their vote matters. Who do you want to negotiate on your behalf, not just for the president but for other elected local officials that impact our day-to-day lives? Remind them yes, the system is broken, but not participating doesn’t make the system better. Really listen to them. Maybe all this time, no one else has.
A month ago, Lucas and I took some time off, our first break all year to truly disconnect from work. There was still so much of the Puget Sound area that we hadn’t explored, so we decided to do a few nature walks and hikes.
But I have a phobia of walking down steep things, or paths with a big drop besides it. Sometimes I have to take a breath at the top of a long set of stairs before I take my first step down. Sometimes I get so scared that I end up scooting down a path on my behind. I feel a lot of shame about my phobia, especially when those around me are avid nature lovers. So when we go for hikes, Lucas and I make an effort to look up the trails to make sure it’s doable for me.
Poo Poo Point seemed doable (yes, that’s the name, and not my nickname for it based on how I later felt about it; it was named after whistles once heard by loggers on Tiger Mountain). We watched videos, looked through photos, read reviews. Many said it was steep for the beginning of the trail, but it would get better.
When we got there, it was steep the whole way up. “Are we on the wrong trail?” I kept asking Lucas. The whole time climbing up, I was worried about the hike down. I didn’t expect the miles of switchbacks. I didn’t expect the sharp drop of the mountainside. I didn’t expect the constant rockiness of the trail. A family was letting their toddler walk a few feet, then carried her a bit, then let her climb again. If this toddler’s okay here, you will be too, I snapped at myself internally. After a LOT of breaks, we got up to the field at the top where paragliders usually launch off.
I couldn’t stomach the sandwiches we brought. I couldn’t enjoy the view. I was worried about what would come next.
On the way down, when the trail was a little wider, I started strong but then it quickly started to look narrower and grew steeper in my mind. Like vertigo. My feet were frozen. I barely got them to move an inch. Lucas held Barley, who kept charging forward or looking over the mountain side, with one hand, and held mine with the other. I knew that logically it was less safe for me to hold his hand on the narrow trail, that my weight would not be centered. But I couldn’t move forward without him. Sometimes it took me what felt like ten minutes to move five feet.
Whenever people needed to pass on their way up, I would flatten my back against the mountainside, sometimes holding onto a tree, sometimes subconsciously digging my nails into a wall of dirt. When we had to move again a few times I crouched down because I wanted to feel lower to the ground, but then I couldn’t get myself to stand back up. Because I was too scared to find my center. Because I didn’t trust my feet, and I didn’t trust the ground.
“Wait, please wait,” “Hold on,” “I can’t,” I remember saying to Lucas constantly.
Twice people behind us had to pass. “Sorry,” I couldn’t help but say. “I have a phobia.” or “I’m scared.” Both times they told me not to rush. It’s okay. Take your time. We can pass when it’s safer. I repeated their words and kindness to myself, it’s okay, take your time. And after I was able to let them path, I took my mask off, and both times I cried. There were tears and mud on my face. I couldn’t breathe. My heart was pounding. I felt embarrassed. If children could walk these paths, why couldn’t I? Barley was zipping back and forth in front of me, sometimes trying to put his paw on me, because he could feel something was wrong. But I was too stressed out and snapped at him to stop.
I tried to imagine a safe wall but could only see the drop. The thing about fears and stress is that when it’s a constant thing, pressing on you continuously for hours, nothing feels rational. Even recounting it right now, I can feel the heat rise to my face, the tears rise to my eyes.
When we finally got to the bottom, my legs were trembling, my whole body shaky. I didn’t know why I could walk up but not down. Everything felt hot.
We drove back to Seattle and stopped at a matcha place for takeout. I wanted to dive into the soothing green. Let me float. Calm me down.
---
Over the weekend, we brought Barley to a city park we’d never gone to before. I wasn’t prepared. This time, for the first time while walking up something, I felt the same fears I had while hiking down the Poo Poo Point trail. I wore the wrong shoes. I thought about how it had no grip while the soles of my feet slipped a little here, a little there, enough to make me freeze and sit on the trail and break down. We were just supposed to be going to a dog park.
I don’t know where to put my feet. I forgot how to walk. I kept saying all this out loud. “I’m right here,” Lucas kept saying.
He suggested I put my arm around his shoulder and he helped me to my feet. I instantly felt calmer, more solid. We slowly walked to the top, where the path opened up to a dog park. I thought about how if I were by myself, I would’ve still been stuck sitting on the trail until someone found me.
Somehow my fear has worsened. Somehow my anxiety has ballooned into something paralyzing.
I’m sure there will be a next time, and I hope the strangers’ words and Lucas’ words will be able to help me push through it. It’s okay. Take your time. I’m right here.
I found myself in a pool of inaction, still waters stretching far in all directions. I knew I needed to start paddling one way or the other to move on, move forward.
For a decade I’ve been wanting to try to make bazang, also known as zongzi in Mandarin, but the process always felt daunting. The soaking, the waiting, the trimming, the stir-frying, the wrapping, all of it. I first realized there was a long process behind these rice dumplings when I was around elementary school-age. Back then, my Chinese school principal would organize a day in the summer to teach us how to make these. Hand-sized giant cones of sticky rice filled with all kinds of savory or sweet ingredients and wrapped in bamboo leaves. She’d come prepped with fillings and rice and we’d try to direct our small hands to fill and fold them into dense packages, many of which I’m sure she later rewrapped or pulled together tighter with extra twine.
The bazang would boil for hours and we would go to the courtyard in the back of the school, which was filled with baby grasshoppers. We would rustle the grass and look carefully for small, light green bodies that leapt from one blade to the next. When we spotted one, we would grab it by the head so its hind legs couldn’t kick us. Sometimes we would put them in jars, sometimes we would let them go. I caught them to prove I could. How mighty we wanted to seem, as children, especially to each other.
When the bazang was done, I’d unwrap one and let the steam hit my face, taking in the smell of pork, of five spice, of earthy bamboo leaves. I had seen bazang on restaurant tables, or pulled out of the freezer by my mom and stuck in a steamer. This was one of the first times I realized that there were foods I could devour in minutes but would take a day to make. It was a labor of love I’d save in my mind for the future, a gift I wanted to give when the time was right.
“You can’t let it put you in a state of inaction,” Lucas said, when I realized that the money tree we bought when we first moved to Seattle was dying rapidly. Mushrooms sprouted in its earth, full branches were yellowing and crinkling and falling off. We thought it had too much water or too little water, but neither was saving it. As it lives near the desk, I couldn’t sit next to it to work because it would remind me too much of the possibility of loss. So I avoided the space, coming back every now and then only to tell it to hang on, because didn’t I read some time ago that they could hear us?
It’s not that I believed the money tree to be the symbol of fortune, as it does in my culture. It wasn’t the material loss the saddened me. My mom had tried many times to grow one, and there was a breath of sadness that occupied our spaces when they didn’t make it. I remember sitting in my auntie’s house in Los Angeles, my neck stretched upward to follow her tall money tree from the ground to the second-floor ceiling. I was in awe. She had it for thirty years.
What I was afraid I’d lose in the death of this plant wasn’t fortune. I was afraid of the repeated failure that might come in trying again and again, solidifying my own personal myth that because my mom was never able to get one to live, I too would be stuck in a perpetual state of trying, of never realizing my dreams, if I couldn’t get mine to live.
Saving the plant might not have been difficult. I could have Googled it. I could have bought a fungicide to try. But taking a step forward felt like a massive task I didn’t want to face. So I let it continue to deteriorate.
On one of our walks we saw a dead rabbit stuck in a hole in fence. It was a limp ball of fluff, caught in place, deteriorated by time. It had died halfway through, one half of it in a world of cement, and the other half perpetually moving toward grass. I was sad and angry and nauseous. And I couldn’t get the image out of my mind.
I asked Lucas to buy a new plant, new dirt, a fungicide. Please, can you pick some up?
The only thing I felt like doing was to finally try to make bazang and gift myself that labor of love I had tucked away as a kid. I had texted my mom letting her know I was going to try to make bazang, and she had called me immediately, the excitement clear in her voice as she shared what used to be in her family’s dish. Pork. Shallots. Mushrooms. Dried shrimp. But I wanted to make it vegetarian, so we thought up ingredients to replace the meat. More mushrooms. bamboo shoots. Peanuts.
Like most calls about cooking, she never had a recipe for me the way many people think about recipes. She didn’t measure and didn’t ask me to measure. The steps were vague, the signs of completion boiled down to gut feeling. Questions of “How much should I put?” would be answered with “You’ll know” or “Look it up online” or “What you feel like.”
She would not give me measurements and I had learned not to ask. Through this process, I think I’m gradually learning to let go of my desire to quantify. This does not equal that. These many thises is not needed to get that many thats. Go with what you feel like. It’s about trusting ourselves, isn’t it? To trust the deep centers we’ve created in growing older, the wells of memories that carry on in our fingers. And if we go with what we feel like and it doesn’t end up where it’s meant to be, we try again.
The message is always there to learn from our mistakes. But it’s not until we fold a few of them with the leaves facing the wrong way, or squeeze a little too hard, that the message sinks in. And it’ll take more and more of these instances to remove it from the cliche. We are all trapped in cycles of trying and trying again, but they’re building our centers inch-by-inch, shaping clay on a potter’s wheel.
Going through the rituals of scrubbing the leaves and running my hands through the rice felt like reading a letter I had written to my future self.
Dear older Angelica,
You can move forward by swirling your hand in the water, draining the deep purple aftermath, and repeating.
You can move forward by prepping.
You can move forward by putting things on heat and filling your space with smells you remember.
You can move forward by starting a long process and taking it one step at a time.
Love,
Elementary school Angelica
Lucas brushed off the mushrooms and repotted the money tree a few days ago. For now it seems its dying has slowed. No new leaves have turned yellow.
Thousands of years ago, according to legend, a famous Chinese poet who was grieving the downfall of his state plunged himself into the river. People threw zongzi into the water to prevent the fishes from eating his body.
When the first batch was done, I unwrapped the bamboo leaves and let the steam hit my face once again, wondering about the things we do to keep ourselves from being devoured.
Broke out of my Animal Crossing haze for a bit over the weekend to try to make Biang Biang noodles for the first time. It felt nice to use only flour, salt and water to make something chewy and magical--to use my hands, to knead the flour, to pinch the dough to see if it would spring back.
The process took a lot of kneading and resting, until we got to slap the strips against our wooden board, pulling as we banged it against the surface to stretch it out into long noodles that span four feet. Biang. Biang. Biang.
Long noodles, long life. Is that something my mom has said to me? I remember birthday noodles and myths of not breaking noodles, to slurp it all up in one full breath, as one full strand, so as not to cut your life short. Or maybe it was told to me by the mothers in stories I’ve read or imagined, mothers who say things because they’ve heard things. And they inhale every little bit, superstitious or not, and pass it onto you because if it’ll give you a fighting chance, why not? Better safe than sorry. Better whole than cut.
And so we made the longest noodles I’ve ever tried. And we stretch and we stretch.
When I ate it, coated in oil and spices, I couldn’t help but only stop when I made it to the other end. A thick connective thread, an elastic string, a chain of truths and untruths. Maybe I made up the myths myself.
What I really wanted to talk about today was the new Animal Crossing, and how for the last week, I’ve been catching butterflies and fishing for salmon and picking seashells off the beach. I get why so many people are playing it right now. We can do things you can’t do in reality. We get to visit your friends’ islands and wish upon shooting stars together. There’s no real overfishing, we can DIY trash, we can watch trees grow in three days with just a single fruit.
Underneath it all, it’s hard to ignore the capitalism. The neverending house payments so we can make our house larger. The (turnip) stalk market. The fact we’re doing manual labor so we can give what we collect to Tom Nook’s kids and receive money he made up. We pillage mystery islands and leave them filled with tarantulas.
But we try to push most of it aside because in this paradise, we can overcome problems we have in the real world. We can make enough to meet the next bill, without consequences. We can visit people’s homes and make ours bigger than a studio or one-bedroom apart. We can escape into a version of reality that won’t truly hurt us, in a time when it seems like everything can.
So we stretch and we stretch, a chain of truths and untruths, until we form something comforting and understandable.
Exhaustion takes over my other emotions. It’s not a physical exhaustion, but a mental one with a hold so strong that it anchors my core to the bed most mornings, keeping my limbs from finding ground until I absolutely have to.
The thought of what we’ll find out today, and the next and the next, make things a little heavier, a little more unfixable. Maybe its the paralysis, the inaction, the thought that I could be doing something to help. But instead I buy toilet paper and tissues, scroll through feeds, bake cookies late at night. I look at book spines from afar, I want to order takeout but don’t want to decide, I let work sink to the bottom of the list while I sink deeper into my couch in the day time, in the evenings, in the every time.
Exhaustion feels like your edges are kind of crumbly and your insides are overstretched, like everything’s happening at the same time, all the time. Are you feeling it too? The decision to let the plates stack in the sink, ceramics connected and stuck together by oils and fats. But you clean them in your dreams, just like you wake up faster in your dreams and think you’re brushing your teeth, and getting dressed, and starting your day.
Even your passions exhaust you. The bok choy wilting in the fridge because some days ago you thought you would want to try handmaking biang biang noodles. You write one sentence and delete four. You leave the yoga mats rolled up, collecting dust and dog fur because the expectation of unrolling them is so high.
You think about your future selves and your past selves and search for moments where you don’t grind your teeth and actually call your mother.
“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
And then sometime, after you’ve sunk far enough and long enough into the crevice of the couch, maybe after your dog nudges your arm up with his nose or your husband orders the takeout, you’ll find the energy again, you’ll understand you were exhausted because you care.
But for now, bring a cozy blanket up to your shoulders and ease into the grooves. Hold a hot mug of tea in your hands because that’s all you want to do, even if you can’t bring yourself to drink it. Maybe you’ll sleep without dreaming of anything productive.
I spent a few hours last night with a book of Maya Angelou’s poetry and reread “Alone,” which continues to be relevant when we think about the endless tides of human suffering -- wars, displacement, hunger, loss and, at the forefront of our minds, COVID-19 and its impacts on health, the economy, social order.
Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
COVID-19 forces us to be contained in our homes, for those who can be, and gives new meaning to finding human connection when we have to physically distance ourselves. The poem reminds us that to make it, we have to work with others. Maybe by staying in. Making masks. Buying groceries for someone who can’t. Donating to food banks, health organizations, child care services, for instance. Busting myths and misinformation with empathy.
Lucas started his sourdough starter a few days ago, and today it was full enough to scoop out some of the excess and fry it. Sourdough is flour and water and air (well, the microorganisms in it) and time. They work together as you feed it and feed it, and it grows and grows.
It’s resilient, and it depends on a community and thrives by chance. The community of organisms, of bacteria and wild yeast, from our homes and our bodies, come together to survive the sticky, acidic mixture.
Sourdough is the oldest form of leavened bread, likely discovered by ancient Egyptians by accident.
California Klondike miners carried starter with them over a century ago.
“... they carried starter in their backpacks to make bread without having to find a town, let alone yeast.” - NPR
People pass them on to families and friends and on and on, forming a web of connection that could last decades (or even 120 years, for this Yukoner’s starter).
Resilience, community, chance.
It’s something beautiful to watch it come alive, to see what even the smallest of communities can do. Because nobody can make it out here alone.
The ways my husband and I eat are so different. His eating is more orderly. He’ll finish off one element in his bowl at a time, while my meals tend to look like I trapped chaos in a bowl. (And if there are multiple dishes I’ll want to find a way to taste everything at once, or in rapid succession). The remains of sauces run in turbulent streaks across the plate when I’m done eating, while his plates at the end of meals look clean and unstained (I bet he secretly washes them when I’m not looking).
But if you ask about our work styles, we’re completely flipped. I keep everything hyper organized--meetings, to-dos, goals. While his mind is shuffle-stepping from one to-do to the next and back.
Yesterday on a video chat, a friend mentioned that (and I might be over-simplifying because I’m not a biologist or doctor!) our nose hairs produce these MHC molecules that float out of our nose when we kiss someone. And if we like the kiss, its probably because we’re MHC-different and people prefer partners with an MHC that’s different than our own. (Because genetic diversity or something.)
In these ways, opposites do really attract, and in trying to be more present and take note of our days, I’m noticing more and more how different--and compatible--we are. He likes to work on the couch, and I like to work on the desk. I prep and open up a poop bag before walking the dog (my hands get so dry!), and he doesn’t even think about poop bags until our dog goes. He cooks rice with a measuring cup and I eyeball everything. I like my iced coffees with milk and he likes his black.
And sometimes when we’re not counterbalancing, one smoothing out the wrinkles the other creates, we meet in the middle. We laugh at the same jokes, we yell about the same news headlines, we get excited about the same recipes.
The days feel so much fuller and easier knowing we’re navigating this together, this something that we’re all still comprehending.
Sidewalk art we saw on our walk today.
Here’s to finding and observing the small moments of connection between you and loved ones. 🍻
In the care package my mom sent me, she included gloves, masks, some Chinese medicinal herbs I have no clue what to do with, and a package of instant Taiwanese oyster mee sua (but without the oysters).
When we had visited Taiwan last year, it was the first dish I had asked to eat, because I was craving it for years. She, along with my cousins and my aunt who live there, had taken Lucas and me down one of the night markets. We stuffed ourselves with Hot Star fried chicken, boba, fried tofu, mochi and more. We ducked into a tiny busy street shop that sold oyster mee sua and shared a table with others. We were all sat so close, the spaces between us thick and sticky like the bowls of noodle soups that came out in just a few minutes. It’s hard to imagine that kind of closeness right now, the idea of sharing food with family and with strangers at the same table.
We had slurped down the wheat vermicelli so fast to make room for more customers. I loved every spoonful. Soup thickened by potato or corn starch, seasoned with rich bonito flakes, topped with braised pork intestines, oysters and cilantro. It’s a sea of textures--chewy, plump, soft, smooth, thick. Humble yet extravagant.
I was hit with the same taste and smell when I opened up the package of instant oh ah mee sua, although I only had celery in my fridge to top mine with. I don’t know how my mom got it, if she had asked someone to send it to her from Taiwan, or if she had bought it on our trip there and brought it back to the States. But I took it as a little nod that she remembered, a moment of connection I didn’t expect to have during the stay home orders, a memory shipped and sealed and opened and cooked, all the way from her home to mine.
I also wanted to share that Lucas and I tried making the whipped matcha again yesterday, and it was a success. :)
And last note, today our internet wasn’t working for most of the day, which made it pretty impossible to work. I’m grateful that we were able to get it back, so I can write this post (and watch Terrace House). Also, a shout out to local coffee shops for being a reliable source of caffeine, WiFi and community before the pandemic. You are true treasures we often take for granted.
Some of my favorite spots in Seattle that are still offering take-out or shipping:
The colors of matcha are calming, vibrant greens. Maybe it’s the chlorophyll, the green blood of plants, the pigment that absorbs the light, that remind me of light and peace, of quiet movement in the world.
To give the Dalgona craze (a whipped coffee drink named after a South Korean candy and is going viral on TikTok and Instagram) a little twist, Lucas and I tried it with matcha today during lunch. When we attempted it the first time, we used water, and the matcha mixture was still a heavy liquid.
“Let’s try it again,” I kept saying. “The ratio’s off. Something’s off.” His hand was on the electric hand whisk, buzzing and droning my words out for ten minutes. He added more sugar, more water, more sugar, more water, adding up the grams that flashed on the scale and trying to make it work. But whatever was in instant coffee wasn’t in the matcha powder. And my voice kept rising and the whisk kept buzzing, until finally I looked up a recipe, proof that we were not doing it all right.
Small moments of frustration had found their way into our day-to-day, especially when it came to food, maybe because food is so important to the both of us and we both have different ideas and manners of doing things.
“Let’s start over. Just listen,” I repeated. Finally, he relented.
We tabled the mixture that wasn’t working and stuck it in the fridge. This time we used the aquafaba instead of water. He whipped the aquafaba and I poured in the sugar. The whisks went on and we measured and we poured and we whisked and we measured and we poured, measuring spoon by measuring spoon.
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
— T.S. Eliot
After a few minutes, peaks formed and we added in the matcha, fluffy clouds of jade green spooned onto cups of almond milk.
We can make them fluffier, we both thought.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
The drinks tasted sweet and light and calm. There was no bitterness left on our tongues. Tomorrow, we’ll try again.
I also wanted to share a moment today from our walk with Barley. A girl, around 6 or 7 years old, rode up to us on her bike, and I was panicking about her getting too close to us. But she stopped 6 feet away to tell us, “I’m riding my bike with my brother and sister!” After we gave her a, “Great job!” she rode off excitedly to meet her family. I’m grateful for the joy she spread and shared with us, the excitement of being able to ride with people she cared about.
My siblings and I never got bikes to ride as kids, and we never learned. But maybe one day when we’re all in the same city once again, we can find a way to hop on bikes, and I can scream to a stranger that I’m riding with my siblings.
My morning routines, or the threads of them that I’ve been trying to keep, consist of listening to podcasts like the NYT’s “The Daily” as I wash my face and smash my dog’s, Barley’s, canned food of hydrolyzed protein, mixing it with psyllium husk and an Omega-3 oil supplement for his allergy and skin issues.
In the repetitive mashing of the fork, turning solid into paste, I can’t help but feel guilty of the stray dogs we kept as pets when we were kids on Guam. On mornings before we left for school, the leftover bits, bones included, were scraped onto the cracked asphalt and dirt-coated driveway, ready for them to devour.
I didn’t know there were things dogs couldn’t eat. I didn’t know bones could splinter into shards that could cut their mouths and digestive organs. The myths my parents learned, I inherited. I hug Barley tight sometimes and say I’m sorry over and over, thinking of and Cookie and Chocolate Chip, the strays I named but never gave a real home to. I look into Barley’s amber eyes when he’s anxious about a sound or sudden change, and I wish I knew what happened to them. My grandma said they walked, one by one, into the boonies to die.
Those memories feel like a different time. Sometimes they feel imagined, like I’ve written about them so many times, what if I made them up, made them real?
And now I’m floating in another time, where people are isolated in homes. Physically distant, not socially distant, the experts say. Staying home is a privilege, we repeat. Not stuck at home, safe at home, we quote.
On “The Daily,” yesterday, George Saunders read his letter to his students as we face the pandemic.
“But this is far from the first time the tiger has come awake. He/she has been doing it since the beginning of time and will never stop doing it. And always there have been writers to observe it and (later) make some sort of sense of it, or at least bear witness to it. It’s good for the world for a writer to bear witness, and it’s good for the writer, too. Especially if she can bear witness with love and humor and, despite it all, some fondness for the world, just as it is manifesting, warts and all.”
I know I haven’t written in a while. The anxieties have been building up as I work on my short story collection and struggle to believe my ideas are worth telling. But maybe I just need to take the time to note what’s happening, to pause with my thoughts, to write things that don’t need to have meaning right now, not yet.
There’s at least another month until the stay-at-home order is lifted. I’ll try to document one moment a day on here.
---
Today, I woke up slow, sleeping in because I didn’t want to do anything, and I was worried about my job hours being reduced by 20%, the writing I haven’t done in weeks, the books I take off my shelf only to put them back again, the myths and misinformation my mom keeps sending that I have to debunk (most recent one was about the pH levels of coronavirus and the types of food people should eat). Endless chains of anxiety.
But at least.
I try to remind myself -- this bound mindset of gratefulness we feel like we need to practice. For perspective, for sanity.
But at least, I have a job right now.
But at least, Lucas has a job.
But at least, our families are healthy.
But at least, we have ways to communicate.
But at least, I have a morning ritual.
Lucas made veggie sausage patties, smashed fried potatoes and roasted tomatoes on a baguette. The first time we tried smashed potatoes was at a brunch spot in Fremont last year, and recreating it has been our special weekend indulgence since. (Kenji Lopez has a great smashed potato recipe if you want to give it a go.)
It’s crispy on the outside and tender on the inside. It fills the apartment with garlicky goodness and warmth.
We ate them today on the couch (we just moved apartments last week and don’t have a dining table yet), and Barley was curled up against me. I thought about how he’s finally not afraid to step outside the door in this quiet neighborhood, and give him a scratch behind the ears.
I haven’t written in a while—new dog, new job, new city whose spirit I’m still learning. Maybe it’s really my own uncertainty about my writing that has stopped me. But the idea of living dyingly followed me relentlessly all day today, taking small punches until I felt that backslide as I stood between streams of people.
I finally had a cup of coffee this morning, my first in two weeks. I sat in front of the coffee shop, on a chair on the sidewalk in downtown Seattle, a few feet from a man on an electric scooter begging passersby for change, across a woman in neon clothes pacing back and forth with a cigarette, under scaffolding that boxed me in. I was half-expecting to see someone walk across and pull down his pants, as I’d seen too many times here. I always wondered if they felt free when they did it, if they felt anything, if they were cognizant, if they were living dyingly in their own ways.
A block away was the Holocaust center, where I later went on a tour for work. For an hour we heard about the survivors who made it to Seattle, who said it was luck, pure luck, that separated them from the dead. We were encouraged to find themes still relevant today, the threads thick and obvious in my mind. Identification, exclusion, flight and rescue. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I think of my dad, of boat people, stuck between borders that wouldn’t open. I think of luck. It was always about luck with my family, surviving especially. Your dad’s luck was good, my mom would say. Mine not so good. My dad is dead, my mom still trying to break from his death. Later she followed the lines on my palms, measured the size of my ears. Your brother’s luck is good. We left mine unspoken.
In the after-school tutoring I volunteer for, the beginning 15 minutes or so is spent reading quietly. I started Edwidge Danticat’s “The Art of Death.”
Danticat writes about how her mother, when she lived dyingly, would tell Danticat to give doctors her book.
“This is a special woman,” Dr. Blyden said, referring to my mother. “She raised an author.”
My mother beamed. The big, broad smile on her face that day made me want to run from the doctor’s office and shout, irrationally, to everyone in my path. “My mother is dying and I write books!”
When my dad was dying, I was in the very beginning stages of being a writer in college. My mom and I went into the boardroom of a care facility that wouldn’t accept my dad who was on life support. I can’t remember why, something about Medicare timing out. Something about my mom not being happy about how he was treated the first time he was there.
And in her first and only time calling me a writer, my mother told me in Mandarin to tell the board of medical professionals before me that I was a writer. Tell them, she said, weaponizing what I wanted to do and be.
“No,” I said.
“My daughter. Writer,” she said.
A woman who understood Chinese said in English, “I know what your mom is trying to say.”
“She tell her dad’s story,” my mom said, despite it not really crossing my mind before or even talking to her about it.
My daughter. Writer. really meant Be careful she will write about this. In that moment I felt the pressure to be my family’s advocate while knowing I couldn’t handle it. I typed notes from the meeting on a laptop I since haven’t been able to access. There’s so much I can’t access.
All this was going through my mind when one of the second graders offered me a gum, “Do you want one? I don’t know why but I’m feeling generous today.” A fourth-grader was creating a character he named “Derp” who is derpy, then offered me an apple chip. Later I helped another second-grader write a story about a superhero who gets people to do what she says, but when the bad guys can’t hear her because they have special headphones on, she has to scream so loudly she almost loses her voice.
I’ve been screaming so loudly into my writing about death, about my dad’s death, that I’m losing my voice. And really the story I should be writing is about my mom, the one who’s luck isn’t so good, the one whose past I still only get in somewhat fiction-like fragments and whose future I’m afraid of inching toward, the one whose daughter is a writer.
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Lucas and I ordered at the counter, then sat at the only open table left. Xi’an Noodle on the Ave was meant to be a reminder of home, according to owner Lily Wu. And in many ways it was: the smell of chili oil and cilantro, a hot pot self-serve station with drinks from Yeo’s lined up above. And though the overall crowd was mixed, the chatter of a few Chinese families prompted memories of my own family sitting at Chinese restaurants during Sunday lunches.
Back then, my siblings and I tended to complain about our parents’ choices. Another Chinese restaurant? When can we try Mexican or Italian or have some burgers?
Now I sought out Chinese restaurants in whatever new city or burb I moved to and tried to order the foods my parents used to order, ones I tended to know only visually and not by name. Once I settled in, I would look for a place I wanted to take my mom to one day. (Luckily, with the huge range of Chinese food that exists, and the Chinese communities and mini Chinatowns I’d seen in every place I traveled to, these spaces hadn’t been difficult find.) It was a ritual I didn’t realize I partook in until we got to the noodle shop in Seattle.
We didn’t wait too long before a big bowl of wide, hand-ripped biang biang noodles coated in chili oil and shredded meat arrived before me.
I bit into the chewy wheat ribbons and heard my mom in my head praising it for being Q, one of many ways she inherently taught me to value textures as much a tastes. (For QQ, think tapioca pearls, mochi, gummy.) Oil coated my lips, spice and sodium rested on my tongue. I tried everything not to inhale the entire plate. (I used to devour rice, but these last few years, I’ve been intensely craving noodles.)
Lucas and I both thought about a similar moment in London last year, when we went to a place famous for its biang biang noodles, Xi’an Impressions. The small restaurant sat across from the Emirates Stadium, and on that cold and rainy day the windows fogged up and secluded us within its cozy, savory borders. The biang biang at Xi’an Impressions was more pared down with its toppings, and the noodles were truly the star. That was the first time Lucas tried biang biang noodles, and he was hooked.
I'm not the only one in search of understanding the intricacies of Chinese food though. Like Vietnamese, Thai, and Filipino food, Chinese food in the U.S. is no longer mainly a taste of home for immigrants on one extreme and Westernized take-outs on the other.
Food sites and Instagram posts capture lines to the latest Sichuan spot, the best xiao long bao picks, and the gua bao with the most interesting toppings.
These trends drove me to look up the foods my parents talked about even more--to understand the history of the biang biang mian as a dish made by the working class; to read about how rice was a luxury the further up north in China you went, where noodles (made of grains like wheat and corn, for instance) were the staple; to point to Xi’an on a map and envision it as the Silk Road’s eastern end and the site of the terracotta warriors.
I thought about the onomatopoeic word “biang” that Google can’t translate and the 56 brushstrokes required to form the character. I saw the chefs vigorously slapping dough onto a surface through the half-visible kitchen. I watched them pull the noodles and spread them as far apart as possible with their hands, and watched the gluten spring the dough back together.
No matter what shape, the two ends were always connected.
As the biang, biang sound from the slapping reverberated, I thought about how happy my mom will be to know that there are hand-pulled noodles in walking distance of my new home, and how one day soon, she’ll sit across from me and we’ll slurp up the long strips of noodles, wishing for a long life, just like we did before.
Last month, I participated in an online food writing workshop by Kundiman x Winter Tangerine called “To Carry Within Us an Orchard, To Eat,” a line that comes from Li-Young Lee’s “From Blossoms.”
I had hoped for the workshop to be generative and community-building, to help me think of food in new ways, to understand others’ relationships with the political, historical, personal, and communal implications of various foodways. During the week, I wrote more than I had in a long time. The time pressure forced me to be raw and imperfect. It re-energized my belief that food, and the lack of, is the connective tissue that binds us, supports us, makes us.
One of the exercises was to find a new recipe for a dish we’ve never made before, to gather the ingredients, cook it, and write about the experience. I chose claypot tofu, despite my claypot being 5,000 miles away, because I had only eaten it in restaurants with my family and because I had just fought with them and, in the same breath, missed them. (Don’t even know what we fought about now. They had visited me in England for a few days, and our last day together was the day of this assignment.)
Here are some snippets:
I was leaving my family in London’s Chinatown after they flew 5,000 miles to see me. “Are you still angry?” my mom asked when we hugged goodbye in front of an empty boba shop. The phrase she used was 生氣. I leaned away and shrugged my shoulders. The words split apart. 生 Birth. Life. Raw. 氣 Gas. Air. Breath.
I didn’t know when I started to nurture angry air in my womb until it birthed, but the last few days with my family were marked by cycles of placidity and explosions. Our voices could escalate in a heartbeat, our sugar-coated tongues could turn sour with a sip. Each conflict added pressure in my body. When I left to the Tube to catch my train back, there was a pulse, pulse, pulse forming at the top of my head.
When I returned, I took an acetaminophen, pulled down all the blinds, shut off all the lights, and curled in on myself. After a few hours because it was getting so late, I got up and cooked with the migraine (special thanks to Lucas helping me through it).
Slowly, the migraine lifted, and I ate and wrote about the people I’ve tried to make sense of over and over again.
---
Claypot tofu was one of the staple dishes my father used to order when we ate out. It would come to our table, a sizzling bowl of fried but soft tofu, giant orbs of shiitakes, bright red shrimps, a mix of snow peas and carrots, and a viscous, dark sauce that we would spoon onto our rice in heavy doses.
My father ordered claypot tofu, and any other tofu dishes, because it was the easiest thing to chew.
“Do you think I want to eat tofu?” he said once when we all complained about always ordering the same thing.
We never questioned it again. That was also the moment I started paying more attention to the textures and consistencies he went for and the ones he second-guessed. Sometimes I would catch him taking a bite of roast duck, pan-fried beef or braised pork belly. He would slowly chew the meats, then spit them back out on paper as dry, unidentifiable vestiges.
To the older generations in my family, teeth was an aesthetic, not a necessity. To them, it was impossible not to have flawed teeth. “Those teeth are fake,” my grandma would say every time she saw a smiling person on TV, their white teeth in two neat, perfect rows. “I’ve never seen this before. Does your mom smoke?” the dentist asked me when he was putting her under. “No, she was just poor,” I bite. Because underneath it all were the facts: The last thing you care about when you’re trying to keep your children fed, when you don’t even have health insurance, is the state of your war teeth, your refugee teeth, your immigrant teeth.
And the last thing my dad cared about, when cancer ate his colon and climbed up his spine, was what chemotherapy would do to the part of his body that should have been stronger than bone.
The recipe I adopted is from Eat What Tonight. But instead of adding prawns, I made it vegetarian so I could share it with Lucas and replaced prawns with shiitakes and vegetable stock. I didn’t have egg tofu (Didn’t know that was even a thing!) so I deep fried firm tofu and then let it simmer with the other ingredients. Still didn’t nail it, but will have to try again when we move back to the States (where I’ll finally have my claypot).
I wandered from coffee shop to coffee shop for the last two years, wondering when the haze would lift so I could finally feel stable and grounded. Filter coffee pulsed directly through my veins while nu-jazz or bossa nova flowed through the air. I tried to make the words flow, too. But most days I could barely break a hundred words because my brain stumbled on itself while feet breezed through the cobblestones besides me and cyclists whizzed past tourist groups on the street.
Moving to Cambridge had been a dream in many ways. I would write a lot whenever I wanted, fueled by the idyllic views around me, I thought. I would blog about the cities I’ve been to and the things I’ve eaten. At least that was the goal. But sometimes I felt my tongue too short and clumsy for Europe, my skin too dark not to turn faces in a pub. I felt too wrong to write and couldn’t settle in my seat in a way that felt right. Perhaps that was because I always knew we were leaving.
But now, being in Seattle this week, I’ve sat in coffee shops without feeling the urge to keep moving. I reread writing I forgot were mine and left no space for imposter syndrome. I let words run without stopping to fix them. I walked up and down streets trying to add them into my mental map, thinking, this city will soon be my home.
Home.
It’s a word I didn’t know how to use for a while. Maybe like many of my millennial peers, I’m migratory, constantly on the move because we haven’t found something to make us stop. We haven’t found stability. What do you want to do? What is your passion? Where do you want to be? What brings you here? These questions flow through us from other mouths until they leech on, until others call us the young and the restless, selfish, entitled, forever unsatisfied.
But really, we just haven’t yet found home.
And somehow, just in the few days I’ve been here, I thought about the idea of home so much I don’t feel sick and aimless. I realized I’ve turned into my mother, who looks for Chinese food everywhere she goes. I laughed at my $5 cold brew habit (which, honestly, won’t change anytime soon) that I started since living in L.A. For the first time though, while sitting in a coffee shop in Ravenna, I remembered things I haven’t thought about in years, like my coffee roots.
When I was a kid, my dad looked old enough to be offered the senior discount for coffee for McDonald’s on Guam even though he was 40 (those cups of coffee every morning was the only thing that would fuel him as my siblings and I chowed down on rice, eggs, and spam from the breakfast menu on the way to school). My grandma’s coffee of choice was the Mr. Brown Iced Coffee you get in small steel cans (yeah, the same ones that were later found to be contaminated with melamine). She would buy boxes of them every month, letting us take a few sips when my mom wasn’t looking.
Somehow I was drinking one of the best coffees in the city but trying to recollect the robust taste and aroma of a Mr. Brown.
Weird how home just hits you like that, doesn’t it? Home is old memories that come in vibrant colors and flavors when you least expect it – that make you tear up as your feet take you out of the coffee shop, uphill past unexplored restaurants and cafes, stores you’ve yet to go in, cemeteries of the dead you have no roots to, that make you break into a sprint so you can reach the top to see a city of trees and pavement and water you don’t yet know. But you just know. This is it. This is where. Everything brought me here.
