11th
I carefully spooned and tasted the dizzying array of Cantonese fare on the table. My mother-in-law was celebrating her birthday. Surrounded by the buzzing voices of full-bloodied Chinese customers and the sea of chinky eyes, I was reminded of the deep connections that accompanied these familiar tastes. I held back the tears and kept my eyes closed, calculating the weight of gravity.
A Chinese raised in Manila, my stepfather brought to our table the diverse tastes of his homeland– the good, the cruel, the trivial, the utterly wonderful.
Noodles on birthdays for long life. Mandarin oranges, grapes, and other rounded fruits for prosperity. Sticky tikoy and mooncake in pretty boxes for Lunar New Year, with the sight of dragons dancing to the sound of gongs.
On Friday nights, while gorging on Chinese take-out, we children surrounded him and my mother and listened to their stories as they drank beer and wine. Always excitedly, I take the first bite of white chicken and dip it deep in tangy ginger oil. My stepdad allowed me. He will let me take all the meat, even if he loved white chicken, too.
On Sundays, we ate fishball soup and misua at a sidewalk stall in Ongpin. Sometimes, it was maki and kiampong at Delicious, or hakaw and chicken feet at The President’s Tea House. It was always the same food weekly for years. Sometimes it was spectacular, sometimes just okay.
But now, three years after his death, it turns out to be the most comforting but also the most painful to eat.
These are flavors, are prior truths that remind me very much of home, of a part of home that I no longer have access to. Hearts in bowls and chopsticks – sweet, savory, tangy, heartwarming, and smarting like a papercut – all at once.
It takes forever to remedy the gaping wounds that death creates, if they can be remedied at all. One day you are all glitter and sun rays, then the next you are in a dim room where smiling hurts; where the only way to nurse pain is with a pile of laundry and to ask for one more hug from your daughter.
On the 7th, we visited his grave – a grassy space lined by soaring trees, lost among clouds and the sound of airplanes jetting off the city. They were low lying, massive, almost too near to touch, almost surreal.
The sun bore down as I ran my fingers through the carvings on stone. “Kung Hei Huat Tsai,” I muttered under my breath.
