Growing a Family | DESCENT ISSUE #2

BY ALLY GUO

The earliest memory I have of my mother— just mā-ma, nobody else at the fringes of my mind—is of her cooking in the kitchen when I returned from Yellowstone.

My dad, bà-ba, had taken me and both sets of my grandparents on vacation. Mā-ma had stayed behind: 1) to look after my younger brother, Ethan, and 2) because she was supposed to take me to China right after we got back.

As soon as the laundry room door opened into the main hallway, my 6-year-old body spilling back into the house, she turned around and smiled. Her hair was tied up in a bun and a blue apron was wrapped around her waist.

“啊，已经回来了?” (“Oh, you’re back already?”)

It’s a strange memory to have. She didn’t cook very often, and the image of her in the kitchen seems out of place. But that’s the way I remember her anyway.

Allium tuberosum, 韭菜, garlic chive. Solarium lycopersicum, 西红柿, tomato.

I’ve long hated garlic chives, jiǔ-cài, as my family calls it. The taste is strange, way too strong, and tiny little pieces always get stuck in my teeth, leaving tomato Solanum lycopersicum韭 菜西 红 柿 the unpleasantness lingering for hours afterward.

Unfortunately, nǎi-nai uses jiǔ-cài in everything: jiǎo-zi, hún-dùn, hé-zi, bāo-zi, and filling for bǐng (dumplings, wontons, pocket pies, steamed stuffed buns, and filling for bread). Somehow, despite my best efforts, it ends up on my plate at least once a week—usually more, because nǎi-nai tends to make more food than anyone can eat.

Complaining to her never works. She’s always quick to tell me just how expensive jiǔ-cài is, how jealous people are of our never ending supply. “别人要 都买不到呢!” (“Other people want it, but they can’t even buy it!”)

Of course, I always respond, “Well if they want it so much, you can give it to them!”

But one thing I won’t give to others is tomatoes. There are two types in nǎi-nai’s garden: the big fat ones so smushed they look like pincushions and the small circular ones that resemble oversized marbles. The big ones always wear crimson, but the small ones don scarlet or gold, depending on their mood.

Combined with eggs, tomatoes are my favorite soup ingredient. I like tomatoes and eggs in a lot of things, but the soup is always the tastiest. In fact, I wouldn’t hesitate to call it nǎi-nai’s best dish. I think most members of my family would agree as well.

My paternal and maternal grandparents alternated the time they spent with us, one pair staying for the first half of the year, the other pair arriving as soon as six months were up. My maternal grandfather, lǎo-yé, cooked when he was around, and my paternal grandma, nǎi-nai, cooked when she was. Mā-ma sometimes cooked when she wanted to but never often enough for me to recall what she made.

A lot of our food came from nǎinai’s garden. The eldest of five surviving children, she’d come from a farm, and she’d spend hours each day planting, weeding, and watering enough food to feed multiple generations of family. I didn’t like most of the plants she grew, though. Tomatoes and cucumbers were great, but jiǔ-cài, dōng-guā, and cōng (garlic chives, wax gourd/winter melon, scallion) were revolting.

My favorite meal was probably the McDonald’s chicken nuggets Māma bought after my Monday swimming lessons. Those were a rare delicacy, flavor bursting in my mouth after a hard day of paddling. In contrast, my grandparents’ cooking was smelly and commonplace.

Cucumis sativus, 黄瓜, cucumber.

Summer is the time of cucumbers. When I was a child, nǎi-nai would harvest 80 cucumbers a season, and I would eat three a day.

It was a ritual of sorts. I’d come downstairs after sleeping half the afternoon away, and nǎi-nai would call me lazy before pointing to a plate of sliced cucumbers on the table. I’d thank her, promise to sleep and rise earlier the next day, and scurry into the dining room to feast. I always started with the middle pieces, avoiding the discolored and disfigured ends but gorging on them anyway once the centers had been eaten.

We usually gave away cucumbers, too. Every summer, nǎi-nai would approach me on three separate days, a cheeky grin splitting her face as she handed me a plastic bag wrapped around two of her longest cucumbers. She knew I hated going to the neighbors— hated awkwardly gesturing to the bag as I babbled on. No matter how many years I made deliveries, I never lost the string of dread that wound in my gut as I approached the front porch next door. Even in recent years, when the pests invading nǎi-nai’s garden have ruined most of her cucumber crop, she still makes sure to send our closest neighbors two each.

However, nǎi-nai’s generosity does not extend to these pests, which she hates with a burning passion. The summer before my junior year of high school, she caught four possums in traps when they dared step too close to her arbor. Bà-ba and I released most of them into a forest, but apparently, nǎi-nai threw one down the sewer in a rage.

I always thought that was a bit cruel, but whenever I brought it up, she’d scoff.

“它们是害兽. 活得了.” (“They’re vermin. They can survive.”)

The pests, combined with generally unfortunate weather and disease, mean we’ve been getting fewer cucumbers since I started high school. There’s still a decent amount, but I can’t eat three a day anymore—sometimes not even one.

Which is why most summer mornings these days, nǎi-nai can be found cheerfully informing me (because she loves seeing me squirm), when I finally drag myself out of bed, that there are no cucumbers to eat today.

I don’t remember what mā-ma’s cooking tasted like, and my maternal grandparents stopped coming after she passed away. Then, my paternal grandfather’s health started failing, and eventually, nǎi-nai was the only one living in our house. It didn’t take long to get her a green card, and soon she was staying in the U.S. year-round.

Every day, nǎi-nai made breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Xī-hóng-shì-chǎo-jī-dān, dòu-jiǎo-chǎo-jī-ròu, yáng-cōng-chǎo-niú-ròu (tomatoes with eggs, green beans with chicken, onion with beef). The ingredients were different, but the style of every meal was the same: two to three stirfried dishes to complement the rice, followed by a large pot of vegetable soup. Sometimes, there were dumplings or steamed buns to spice things up (though I didn’t like them very much), but the stir fry, rice, and soup were dependable staples.

I liked what we ate, so whenever someone asked me what my favorite cuisine was, I always said Chinese.

Brassica rapa var. parachinensis / Brassica chinensis var. parachinensis, 菜心, choy sum Basella alba, 木耳菜, Malabar spinach Pyropia yezoensis / Pyropia tenera, 紫菜, nori

Vegetable soup is a complicated affair. My family has it every day, but every day, the vegetable soup experience is different.

If you asked me to name the plants drifting through the broth, I’d tell you it’s impossible. Whenever I ask her what something is called, nǎinai responds with some colloquial name nobody outside Lián-yún-gǎng, Jiāng-sū understands. But that’s to be expected—almost everything that ends up in that old soup pot comes from her garden. Even the tiny bits of bug trapped in the floating nets of wispy egg whites are 100% homegrown.

I used to avoid vegetable soup after every meal. Everyone else in the house drank it religiously, but Ethan and I always refused. I’m not sure what caused me to change my mind, but one day in middle school or early high school, I randomly asked for a bowl after a heavy dinner.

One sip and I was hooked.

Alongside eggs and fish tofu, three of the most frequent visitors to the soup realm are càixīn, mù-ěr-cài, and zǐ-cài. I usually like all three, but their potential depends heavily on the amount of salt nǎi-nai sprinkles in.

The way nǎi-nai uses salt mirrors the way she cooks in general. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her weigh or measure ingredients. She just lifts her hands and begins ripping, chopping, stirring, and steaming so naturally it feels like she’s guided by some invisible being. Her means always seem arbitrary, but the food still turns out exceptional. Unfortunately, salt-sprinkling may be her only weakness. More often than not, the soup ends up too bland, with nǎi-nai having forgotten to put in any salt at all. But we drink it anyway, because vegetable soup is vegetable soup, and we chomp on the leaves and slurp up the broth, whether it tastes like anything or not.

Bà-ba got married a second time sometime during 2013. At least, I think it was 2013. They never actually told me they got married; I found out a year later when I discovered photos from a porch wedding I wasn’t invited to in his camera roll. But my half-brother, Eric, was born in 2014, and I went through a brief stint of hiding their wedding rings around this time, so I’ve always assumed it was 2013.

Ā-yí was a weird presence in my life. We were always friends, but I was never quite sure I was supposed to be friends with my stepmother. Lots of things changed during this time, but a small yet noticeable shift was that suddenly, nǎinai wasn’t the only one cooking.

While ā-yí didn’t cook often, it was striking when she did. As much as she liked Chinese food, she was always trying to experiment with new flavors, so at least once a month, some strange, unexpected dish would appear on our table: chunky barbecue chicken legs, golden slips of Japanese tofu, and vaguely croissantshaped bread. Ā-yí was probably the first person to use our oven in years (nǎi-nai doesn’t even know how to use it).

I usually tried whatever ā-yí made. I didn’t often like it, mainly because I don’t like baked goods, but she always looked so happy whenever someone ate her food.

So I did.

Dioscorea polystachya, 山药, Chinese yam

Ā-yí liked to say she had a refined palate, that she made and enjoyed good food. I think that sentiment is a Sì-chuān thing. That’s the province she was from, and all of China seems to take pride in the food there—in the dishes heaped high with fire red spices that sting more than they burn.

Personally, I don’t like Sì-chuān cuisine very much. It’s not bad, but nǎi-nai doesn’t really use spices in her food, so it’s not an acquired taste. Soy sauce, salt, and scallion are the extent of her accents.

Ā-yí’s only child likes Sì-chuān food even less than I do. But, to be fair, Eric doesn’t like much of anything. Somehow, he subsists solely on unflavored noodles and pre-prepared cheese ravioli. They’re from some generic American brand, but we called them xiaojiǎo-zi, little dumplings, since he won’t eat real dumplings. He’s awfully picky and will throw a tantrum if he sees even the tiniest green leaf in his noodles. Ā-yí took to mashing meat and vegetables into a paste just to sneak them into his mouth.

But strangely enough, one legitimate Chinese food he ate from a young age was shān-yào, or Chinese yams. I don’t know why; personally, I thought it tasted even worse than jiǔ-cài. Or maybe by the time I started high school, nǎi-nai had fed me so much jiǔ-cài I couldn’t hate it anymore.

I don’t know if ā-yí ever realized how much nǎi-nai criticized her. But I think she did because she once tearfully told me that, sometimes, it felt like nobody in our household liked her. That wasn’t true, and I was deeply ashamed when I heard her say that.

But it was true that nǎi-nai wasn’t terribly fond of her. She never said anything to ā-yí’s face, but she whispered to me instead, with everything from ā-yí’s eyebrows to her parents coming under fire. In a way, it was almost a cultural difference: ā-yí liked shopping and fine dining and all the expensive things nǎi-nai, and even mā-ma, had no interest in. If ā-yí liked spices sprinkled over her food and life, nǎi-nai preferred to taste the simplest flavors instead.

On the other hand, ā-yí was always sweet to nǎi-nai. She had a fiery temper, sure, but nothing worse than hushed concerns was ever directed at nǎi-nai. In fact, one of my fondest memories of ā-yí was related to nǎinai’s tomato soup. It was a normal dinner, and everyone in my family who drank soup was sipping on it when suddenly:

“哇，奶奶的西红柿汤真好 喝呀!” (Wow, nǎi-nai’s tomato soup is so amazing!”)

I don’t know why that one throwaway line has stuck with me, but it always made me happy that ā-yí loved something I also adored. But that was just one of the many things about her I always took for granted.

I think one of my deepest regrets is not letting ā-yí know how much we appreciated her before she passed away.

Luffa acutangula, 丝瓜, luffa

If you pass by my house in late summer, you’d see an enormous green gourd tied to the side of the garden fence by a ragged cloth, like some bulbous arm in a sling. Even if you recognize it as a luffa, or sī-guā, you’ll still be surprised by how massive it is—as long as my torso and much thicker than a baseball bat.

According to nǎi-nai, big sī-guā usually don’t taste good, so while she dumps the majority into soup and stir fry, the chunkiest of them all is strung up to be utilized as next year’s seeds.

Nǎi-nai has a use for everything. The food waste from the kitchen goes into her multiple compost bins; the spare bags and netting from grocery stores are made into fences and flags; the spare sīguā she doesn’t want to eat become the progenitors of next year’s generation.

Most sī-guā taste the same to me, no matter their size, but I trust nǎi-nai’s palate and know-how more than I do my own.

During my sophomore year of high school, I was invited to my first ever grad party. It was for the senior who drove me home after volunteering. Her family was from Egypt, so when the food was served, I piled my plate high with Mediterranean dishes I’d never seen before.

Before I ate, I sent a quick snapshot to bà-ba.

He responded in his trademark mild manner: “Looks good.”

There was some sort of meat, some sort of bread, some sort of cheese, some sort of everything. I made sure to try a little bit of it all.

When I got home later that night, I sat in the office with bà-ba, chattering about the party long after everyone else had gone to bed. But when I started talking about the food, he suddenly interrupted me. “好像你挺喜欢尝外国菜, 但你不太愿 意试新中餐.”("It seems you’re always eager to try other types of food, but you never want to eat new Chinese food.”)

It wasn’t accusatory, more amused if anything, but I immediately became defensive, words spilling out of my mouth incoherently.

But in hindsight, he’s totally correct. Going to any Korean, Indian, or Mexican restaurant or party has me picking off a bite of every dish, but when Chinese food is served, I’ll cower in my seat, grabbing only the things I already know I like.

I guess I don’t like Chinese food very much after all. I just like what nǎi-nai makes.