Made with Love: Dishes to Take to College
As freshly minted high school graduates on their way to college, Emily and Davina know they’ll miss their parents—though if we’re being honest, they’ll miss their parents’ cooking even more. These two dishes, taught with patience (and met with varying degrees of success), carry with them the taste of home and all the meaning that comes with it.
by Davina J and Emily C
A Bottle Half Full
Emily C
Your mouth feels chalky. The air is unmoving, a never-ending substance to wade through. Table legs stretch up and up into the distance, and cliff-like table tops overlook you in stern silence. Need water. Now.
The stairs are half your height, and you’ve decided to conquer the known world. But for now, the greatest challenge you can imagine is pouring a cup of water. Mommy, you almost say. This strange, comforting higher being who tends to your hunger, thirst, and pleas for attention. Why does this creature care so much? You don’t know, but at the same time, you are the center of your universe; therefore, anything that exists is in relation to you—either for or against. This “Mommy” isn’t here right now. Perfect time for some character growth.
As a complete beginner in this game of survival, you’re ready to ace this. Mommy will be so proud when she sees you providing for yourself.
Challenge 1: Acquire Water.
There’s an excited buzz in your head as you toddle over to the water bottles conveniently placed on the ground, beckoning for you to pull one into a warm, pudgy embrace. As your arms circumnavigate the brand-new bottle, the slippery surface feels absolutely luxurious in your hands. This reminds a tiny part of your consciousness that Evian water is the pricey stuff, remember? No worries! Not a drop will go to waste, not while you’re in charge. The tiled flooring proves to be just as treacherous as the hefty bottle, but you manage to waddle past the curving redwood banister and inelegantly plop the bottle on the ground. Somewhere along the way, you also collected a ceramic mug! Sweet!
Challenge 2: Pour the Water.
You carefully set the mug on the lowest marble step, since tables are overrated and not made for creatures of your stature. You steady the bottle, tucking the back of it under the armpit. You lean to peer over the rim of the mug, double-checking the aim and angle of the bottle and trying to predict the trajectory of the oncoming waterfall. Alright, enough dawdling, time to face the music…
***
I’ve overcooked the mushrooms. Even at a fraction of its power, the kitchen hood is roaring in my face as I toss and turn the sizzling button mushrooms, which have quickly darkened from an off-white to a questionably charred brown. The trustworthy guy in the YouTube video had declared that mushrooms are “almost impossible to overcook, since they’re mostly made of water,” but I’ve overwatered a cactus before, so I remain concerned.
It’s day four of my stint as that boy from Home Alone, and between wiping down the sink, vacuuming the floor, and responding to every demanding, guilt-tripping, yet cutesy meow of our two cats, I’m actually surviving so far.
The actual spaghetti that was made while home alone!
My right hand goes to the bottle of PureWater, tipping just a couple of tablespoons into the boiling pot of pasta. The package recommended that I cook the spaghetti for eleven minutes, longer than most other spaghetti. Just like my mom, I think the package knows best; the pasta bends and loops as I poke at it with metal prongs, but each spaghetto still retains that slightly firm, highly-sought-after al dente texture when I pull it up from the swarm.
The pan is angry. It sputters and hisses, bubbles forming and popping in speeding succession, like an alarm call to stop spacing off and add the tomato sauce to the shrivelled mushrooms already. Thankfully, living in this day and age means that I can easily loop a finger through the pull tab and elegantly yank the metal lid from the tomato can. Smooth, mess-less, and convenient, the chunky tomato sauce glides past the rim of the can, and plops on top of the wood-colored mushrooms, which have shrunk to a quarter of their original size. Immediately, the sauce starts to shriek at the sudden change in heat. It shoots a boiling droplet of tomato at my skin. I recoil with a slight jump, but I keep pouring and scraping the can until all of the contents are drained.
The actual spaghetti that was made while home alone!
A steaming, mahogany-red pile slumps inside a bowl-plate hybrid. The fresh smell of tomatoes and Taiwanese-style Italian restaurants wafts through the open kitchen and over the dining table, where I’ve set down the plate of homemade spaghetti. I even added a teaspoon of chilli oil, since I’m a big girl now. I open the Camera app and find the best angles to show my mom, who’s almost three thousand kilometres away in Japan, yet three feet away on my phone. For various reasons, I’ve called her four times today. I’m supposed to be eighteen, so being home alone shouldn’t be a big deal, but the past few days have been a messy balance between loafing in bed and procrastinating until 12:00 am versus getting my act together: checking chores off my spreadsheet, wiping wet furballs off the floor, and answering a sudden influx of daily text messages from my grandma.
Grandma, 1:08 pm: “Are you at school right now? Tonight, get delivery for dinner. Did Mom give you money? Do you need help with anything? If your classmate is free, you should eat together.”
Typing with a mix of zhuyin and the speech-to-text function, I’m getting so much Chinese practice every time that I respond to Grandma’s questions.
Mom responds with a sticker of that adorable, over-commercialized Hokkaido bird doing a little dance and saying, “Great job!” I smile and send a second pasta photo. More positive reinforcement. The pasta burns my tongue slightly, but I savor the clash of spice and acidity against the umami of the mushrooms, which are not too dry after all.
***
I’m watching old camcorder videos with my Mom. We laugh at the adorable yet humbling sight of my younger self struggling with the simplest daily tasks. The entertainment for this episode: the sight of a wide-eyed baby discovering how to crawl up and down the stairs, tummy flat on the ground, stubby arms flailing, searching for a hold on the treacherous, never-ending cliff. She’s a confused yet determined turtle. It gets a bit repetitive after watching the fifth clip of me squirming up and down the same set of seven stairs. But I’m glued to the screen, relearning the memories I didn’t know I had lost.
***
After studying calculus for four focused hours, I like to stare obsessively at my screen time and question my life’s choices. It seems like things have been getting more and more challenging. For one, the fitness teacher had us hop up the stairs sideways, which looked easy enough at first, but I get vertigo and had to pause before continuing. My legs simply refused to execute the clear image in my head, where I could picture the smooth, continuous movement of: hop, hop hop, switch legs, hop, hop, hop…
***
…Your aim is true, but you forgot to account for the force. The water bottle tilts dramatically; its stream morphing into an uncontrollable jet. It starts chugging like a train without brakes. Glug, glug, glug, glug. The water bottle chokes in protest. You panic:
“MAAAAAAAA!” You summon the taller being, aiming your wail at nowhere in particular, arms fighting to save the bottle from the force of gravity.
Mommy descends from a liminal space between states of reality, stunned by the sight of her daughter wielding a water machine gun. She lifts the bottle out of your hands and wraps you in her arms.
“Evian water, so expensive,” you cry into Mom’s shirt. Because even at this age, you have your priorities straight.
“Haiya, don’t worry about the water. We have so many bottles, too many bottles,” she soothes.
You stare glumly at the mess on the floor, mourning the loss of water that you never tasted, “But I wanted to pour it myself.”
Mom chuckles, “Aw, you’re so cute, trying your best to be independent already! But look, there’s still some water left in the bottle.”
The memory fades there. Gradually, the stairs seem to shrink, putting less strain on the mind. Your worries change, but the challenges still feel insurmountable. But if you lift your head just slightly, peeking over the comfort of your mother’s shoulder, you’ll find that the bottle—on the floor, on the desk, and on the tray table of a sixteen-hour flight to your new life—is still half full.
Emily and Mommy (a couple of years before the water bottle incident)
A STATEMENT FROM THE ARTIST
With the use of second person, I was trying to differentiate and almost contrast the younger version of me with the current-day version of me, whom I write about in the first person. This difference is important because in the ending of the memoir, I was able to speak towards “you,” my younger self, and tell this person that things will change, but you will find ways to overcome these new challenges. Additionally, I decided to start the story in second person in order to place the reader immediately in the action and have them imagine the perspective of such a young (and short) child, who is adventurous and curious, yet overly confident. Thus, this strategy helps communicate my message by setting apart the two personas of the memoir and highlighting the idea of change over time.
Humor is so interwoven in my inner narrative voice that it presented itself as I wrote the memoir. In the first couple of paragraphs, the tone of the thirsty child is more serious, almost philosophical, pondering the nature of adults and why they care. But quickly, the humor shifts the tone of the story. The silliness of the jokes emphasizes that the childhood flashback is a simulation, like a scenario from a video-game. The humor continues throughout the present-day section, adding more personality and individual voice to the first person, “I.” Finally, the ending reveals that the water bottle escapade was a failure, but the humor lightens the tragedy and helps present the mistake as a moment of learning. All in all, I love writing with humor, and I think it aided the presentation of my thesis by making it more lively and varied, drawing the reader in while distinguishing the narrative voice.
The section I’m most proud of is the description of me watching old videos of my baby self trying to climb the stairs. I particularly like the last sentence, “But I’m glued to the screen, relearning the memories I didn’t know I had lost,” because it feels very nostalgic, and the overall section helps connect my spaghetti-making present self with the second person parts of the story. Also, the sentence about the stair-climbing becoming “repetitive” helps reveal how some difficult challenges can become easy and even automatic with practice and time.
Sesame Oil Chicken: A Badly-Edited Documentary
Davina J
Sesame oil chicken is a Taiwanese dish my mom has made for me whenever I felt unwell since I was a kid. It’s the perfect nostalgic recipe to take with me to college. And because my mom (in my totally unbiased opinion) makes the best version, I begged her to teach me. Behold: a shoddily filmed, poorly edited, but love-filled amateur documentary of that process.