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.
“Here,” she’d fly me a magazine. “Have a Vogue place mat.”
When Moira wanted to try a medicinal tea, I knew I had to talk to Mom. And when I finally made the call home, Mom immediately offered to help. She contacted relations, who then called cousins, and I went to Chinatown with an introduction. How un-American, how un-independent, how I hated that clannish stuff, but now I knew Moira would get the best ingredients. With Mom’s connection, I bought 30 packets, as much as I could carry, absolutely sure they were filled with magic. Its brewed pungency and raw, tree-twiggy breeziness seeped into everything.
Moira wanted to know more about the herbs, so I called home again. Mom kept trying to tell me how to make good, nutritious congee—about free-range, fresh-killed chickens, ginkgo nuts. “Tell me what the herbs mean! Tell me what she needs! What else?!”
But something happened. Mom was quiet in a way that made me stop. Behind the quiet, I heard a breath. And then my diaphragm bloomed and I felt my own breath reach deeper. My words came out softer. I was calling to my mother like when I was a child, afraid.
Answering, my mother’s voice was firm, but kind. She said two Chinese words. The first word meant peace. I didn’t know the meaning of the next, so I asked.
“Hold. Embrace. Protect. Nurture. Soothe.”
Comfort.
The first time I made congee for Moira, she asked about the herbal prescription. I could only repeat what Mom had said. “Oon-wei.”
Moira was quiet. “That sounds like ‘one way.’ ”
We laughed softly. When the congee was cooked, I took it out to her in her favorite green bowl.
Moira’s last day, we all knew. Moira had a peaceful night, and I went home to walk my dog, Idaho. Strangely buoyed by exhaustion and fear and expectation, I wandered, walking from the Village toward the east, past the apartment she shared with her husband on Eleventh Street, then down First Avenue. Then I was in Chinatown, then at Big Wong’s.
I heard my order repeated in one word: “Walking.”
And I walked for Moira, revisiting all her places of meaning, where she married, where she had her first show, where she painted. I walked to my apartment. I barely greeted Idaho but went straight into the kitchen, laid out the food on the kitchen counter, foil tin next to plastic tub.
Then I ate. I ate to feed my departing friend.
I ate the duck with my fingers, bit into the dark, rich breast. I sucked the crispy joint on the wing, the aged soy on the drum. I spooned mouthful after mouthful of smooth congee. I remember the textures, crisp and moist, the warm swallow of congee. I ate with an urgency to feed the body, not out of hunger but for farewell, the ritual need of the living.