Monkey Eve
Carolyn
Phillips
Alimentum, July 2014
My Chinese
father-in-law looks over his glasses at the oblique chunks of bean curd piling
up in front of me. He frowns slightly and gently clears his throat, for unlike
his small squadron of perfectly hollowed-out pyramids, my disheveled army is most
definitely not up to his exacting standards. It isn’t that he expects much from
me, the inappropriately foreign wife of his eldest son, but I am definitely irritating
him more than usual today as we prepare his annual Chinese New Year’s Eve extravaganza.
“You are going too fast,” he at last says in his
Cantonese-accented Mandarin. “Watch me.” I stop and take in his glacially slow movements, trying to rationalize
why it should always take forever to cook a meal in his tiny apartment kitchen.
The bustle of Chinatown’s traffic vibrates thirteen stories below us, the
strange flat blue of the Los Angeles sky casting harsh afternoon shadows on his
brushes and pots of ink, the tan smell of sandalwood soap invading every
corner. Firecrackers rip and rebound though the alleys, and wisps of gunpowder
filter in through his living room window.
As always, I am on my best behavior with him — not as wary as when
I am around my volcanic mother-in-law, just very mindful of our generational
and cultural differences. He patiently shows me again what it is that I should
be doing: a fingertip slips into the yielding mass and then scoops up
microscopic bits as he carefully prods away, hollowing out the doufu triangle with
infinite care so that its sides are not breached. He readies them so that they
can be stuffed with marbles of ground pork seasoned in the style of his Hakka
home town in Guangdong hill country. He was forced to abandon this ancient ancestral
fold when civil war exiled him, first to Taiwan and then to the States with his
wife and grown children. As he approaches his eighth decade, these deeply savory
Hakka dishes tether him to the old country and in turn form the sole connections
the rest of us will ever have to his former life....
(please read the rest on the Alimentum: The Literature of Food website)
Illustration copyright (c) 2014 by Carolyn Phillips
