By Michele Wong

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1. Clean bamboo leaves, glutinous rice, and mung beans: Soak accordingly.

You take notes as your mother speaks in Mandarin. Sketchy notes because you never understand half of what she says, but the pull is in the blood. There’s enough DNA between you to shelter any wants. Her hands wash the bamboo leaves as quick and bluff as she used to wash your hair. It’s mid-summer. All you can think of is ice cream as the fan blows beaded sweat into the air.

—Mung beans or yellow beans? 

—Silly melon, you never listen. I told you recipe yesterday. Why you always hide in room? All day reading books. I worry, today you pay attention. Today I make you rice dumplings and herbal soup; today you must eat!

Smile like you’re okay. Don’t try to explain that no herbs can unclose you or that lately, not even books can ease the ache. 

2. Pork belly: Marinade; inhale the slow transcendence of fat. Slice thickly.

—What is the seasoning by the way? 

—Can’t you see? It’s Five-Spice! 

—Ma, you five-spice pork, chicken, everything. 

—You’re like your Ba, non-stop complain! One day, I no cook anymore!

Ignore that she slices belly like she’s slicing your father.

3. Chinese sausage: Chop thickly.

—Ba left us three years ago. Why do you use present tense for him? And you’re a talented painter; you should paint again. 

—Little Melon, you no understand. When Ba leave us for Mr. Moody next door, I not only past, very tense, I also present tense! 

Don’t autocorrect. Notice your mother’s voice, fragile as a moth’s wing. Let her know that you’ve kept her paintings, still-lifes of rainy roads, rivers, and bent trees. Reminders of how she spied a bird’s nest, walked quietly under it, and whispered a prayer. Brushstrokes that once showed happiness, glimpses as soft as blue-bells.

4. Put rice mixture, meats, and leaves into separate bowls. 

Do this quietly, as separation is delicate; your mother’s blood is in your veins, her tongue is in your mouth.

—First, your father help Mr. Moody cut pear tree, then they go fishing, then hunting. I should’ve known, Asian men don’t hunt, they go Costco. 笑里藏刀!

That last phrase, “A dagger concealed in a smile,” was not quite true. There was no trickery; things just changed, and Ba suddenly developed a lust for meat. You could see it in his face when you visited him and Mr. Moody. His eyes were more bright, his new mat of hair like a Jesus beard, and his skin, burnt from hours in the sun. Hard to imagine how he once squirmed at the idea of killing market fish that Mother would buy, and now his hands have skinned fur, sliced entrails, and touched the marrow of death. 

When Mr. Moody showed you their freezer filled with the flanks of their kill, you declined his offer to bring some home. Ba assured you the gamey taste came from the spirit of the wild. Now when he calls, all you see is the blood-stained snow of the Cariboo.

5. Insert meat into rice mixture. Fold into pyramid with two overlapping leaves. 

—Your Ba said my dumpling made him plump. Now I know, I think this rice triangle reminds him of love triangle. But you like dumpling, and so I make again. You eat more, grow strong, and pass your exams. Don’t live like me, 断伞柄遮

Know that your mother excels at metaphors, but she is not an umbrella with a broken handle. No not broken, just mistaken. The only mistake she’s ever made was to believe in the permanence of things. In truth, she was never in any triangle. When Ba met Mr. Moody, his eyes and his heart immediately cleft. It became just the two of them, just two lines joined at the apex of the heart. 

In a way, know that your mother is profound. Sartre once said that our beingness is seen when our nothingness is disclosed, meaning that we define things by what they are not and what we have not. Accept that this is what your mother does well. And yet in five months, she’ll be the only one to hold your hand as you rage in childbirth; in a few years, she will be the one that teaches your daughter to catch the colors of the sun, to throw them onto canvas, to eat a dumpling as if it is life itself. 

7. Bind tight with string. Simmer for six hours.

—My girl, does the air not smell like fresh vine leaves?

Yes—like air that promises something fecund. Don’t tell her that you’ve kissed Mr. Moody’s son under that Pear tree and that you lay splayed on a bed of leaves wanting to never wake up. Or that his nectar of love has bloomed you, and that when he reads you Sartre, you heard your left and right ventricles sing. And that when you told him, you were expecting, he looked into the distance and said he was sorry. Or that you stormed into his room, smashed every Beatles record, including Yellow Submarine (which you adore). Or that when he went off to Nepal to find himself, you felt emptied out, wondering what he meant when he last brushed your hair and said you are nothing and you are everything.

—Come, try this dumpling. For real, I cook better than Mr. Moody.

Yes, she does. And the food she makes is not from the fat of possession, but the fat that burns warmly through the cold and the mire. 

—You are like big pear, big belly but skinny on top. Come eat! Eat!

You see from nothingness, there is now somethingness; you go to your room, take out a blank canvas and a dusty book. 

—Mama, let’s paint, let’s read. For you, for me, for us.

Your mother sighs and sits down softly into surrender. And then you both eat and eat and eat until all sorrow and food are gone.