My first food rebellion was about rice. The day our elementary school started serving lunch, Veda Qwan and I stared at the mounds on our plates and wondered, Could we really be that ice-cream lucky? When Lily Chan tried to pick it up, her fingers disappeared in the white.
“No smell,” I reported.
Veda held her braids back, leaned over her plate, and licked. “Nope. It’s warm and it’s salty!”
Then we all tried. First taste, it was strange-soft on the tongue, then smeary like paste, but grainy and tastier. Best part, no chewing. Easy, easy. Just swallow. We three nodded, a gulp race. Better than baby congee!
That night I told my mother I didn’t want rice anymore. I wanted mashed potatoes.
The rebellion comes and goes but is always a full-size battle whenever I visit San Francisco. My mother has always believed food is the key to immortality, and she’s fought hard to keep my yin and yang balanced. A body’s beauty is about its emanation of energy, and she had me diagnosed before she’d even got me in the house. She’d brought a lively kid into the world, so who is this sallow dullard with the wet cough, the white palms, the limp hair?
Home. The whole trip is about rejuvenation. Mine. One time I find a live tortoise in the bathtub, its markings squares inside squares like a puzzle, and at night its clawing keeps me fitful. When I wake to that telltale aroma, I run screaming into the bathroom, “Where’s that turtle?!”
“Boo for you.” My mother hands me the brew; the layer of fat that rims the bowl is greenish. “Boo for breath.”
Boo. A protecting word to mean treasured, Supreme Nurturance.
I don’t ask what’s in it. I don’t want to know. I’ve learned that it’s not really important what the twigs and grass and shells of bugs are in my soup, or how come that curly, crunchy stuff is elasticky, or why that brew gives me a buzz. Because my energy does improve. I do feel brighter. I breathe deeper, and I face the world with a lot more punch.
Moving to New York, I was the happiest immigrant. I ate irresponsibly and with joy. All yang food one week (crab), all yin (salads) all summer. Awake during yin, asleep during yang, I flipped everything inside out, and I looked it. Mom called it a wuloong lifestyle—a hand in everything, a foothold nowhere, the heart aflutter.
“You’re dragon-dancing. Chasing the immortal pearl.”
But in this chaos, I forged an immortal friendship with Moira Dryer, a young Scotch-Irish Canadian painter. She built stage sets and broke plates as an art assistant to Julian Schnabel. Her work studio was in Times Square. At her 1993 MoMA retrospective, several paintings depicted her daily walk through its peep-show, combat-circus craziness. I was writing, and bartended lunch and hostessed evenings at two un-Chinese uptown places as well as teaching English at Berlitz.
Moira and I knew what we wanted, so everything else was just stuff. After intense work periods, we shopped and giggled and did all the girl things. But, most fun, we ate well together.
Then one day she asked me to accompany her to Chinatown. She was shopping for a stage-set project—was it for Sting? But I was hopeless. I had no contacts, no negotiation skills, and so after we spent a few humiliating hours wandering around, being treated like tourists, she said, “How about some roast duck?”
I made a face. “So bad for you, so fatty.”
But it was Moira who introduced me to Big Wong’s. Walking in, she waved to the fattest of the front-line guys, the smiley one with the giant tweezers who was plucking the half-singed hairs off the duck butts. Quick away, her favorite waiter came with tea, barking hello, hello! and already knowing her order. When the duck and congee arrived, she showed me how to scrape the fatty layer off with a fork.
As she ladled a spoonful of congee, I told her I hadn’t eaten it in ages; that I’d grown up on the baby congee my mother brewed in tiny clay pots. Moira laughed when I told her I had looked like a bird. My mother nicknamed me Mouth Always Open, said I ate as if just released from Famine China. I told Moira my mother’s obsession was hunger because she’d spent her childhood hungry and running. First she’d run from the Invading Japanese and then from the Retreating Nationalists and then from Mao’s Advancing Men. Good guy, bad guy. A game of tag, and everybody was it.
During one run, my mother had carried a half-cooked pot of rice into the mountains. Then, a good meal was a bowl of rice, and the best side dish was salt, wok-fired. She’d dip her chopsticks into the salt treasure before lifting her bowl to take her first big bite. Today she still prefers a nutty crunch to her rice.
“Your mother’s still around?” Moira stared at me, surprised. “You’ve never talked about her before.”
I looked up. She was right, it was true.
After Moira got ill, after it got bad and the repeat treatments grew treacherous, nourishment and comfort became the project, and often it was congee she wanted. So I got in good with the big brothers at Big Wong’s. I’d call in my order. Twenty minutes from Brooklyn and I’d pull up to Mott Street, zap the window down, and Fatty Wong would slip that famous sun-yellow bag onto the front seat, filling the car with perfume and heat. On to Moira’s apartment, the congee at perfect slurping temperature. We ate right out of the tubs, construction workers us.
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