Things We Don’t Say
When things get tough, I get cooking.
Five minutes ago, I showed my sous chef how to hold a stalk of asparagus and flex it gently to find the spot where woody end becomes tender spear. Now she’s clutching one between two fists, breaking it right in the middle. Snap, as it breaks in half, thwack, as the top spear hits the sheet pan, thud, as the bottom spear lands in a metal bowl. It sounds like a vegetable beatbox.
And then there are the cherry tomatoes, a last-minute addition to the menu. It should be so easy: slice in half, toss in oil, add salt and pepper, roast next to the asparagus. But no matter how many I slice and season, there aren’t any on the baking sheet. It seems like as soon as I let go of them, they disappear — into my sous chef’s mouth.
I should mention one thing: my sous chef is two years old.
Growing up, I logged plenty of hours perched on a chair in the kitchen, listening to the slap-shuffle of my mom’s slippers on the linoleum. I don’t remember much, except that I enjoyed the busyness of it all.
I must have gained some appreciation for cooking because when I was six, my favourite book was a cookbook. To be precise, it was Strawberry Shortcake’s Cooking Fun. Each page was illustrated with ruddy-faced, bonnet-clad characters gallivanting among gargantuan food. My favourite was a two-page spread of Strawberry Shortcake’s dog, a spaniel-thing with green striped ears, meant to be enlarged several times on a photocopier and used as a cake stencil. I free-handed it on a tray of cookie dough, and a chocolate-chip Pupcake emerged from the oven with a head two sizes too big and a tail long past golden-brown.
Despite the hours I spent interrogating that book, I only made one other recipe: pinwheel sandwiches. Looking back, they were so much more than faux-fancy ’80s finger food. Pinwheel sandwiches were my first taste of agency, the first thing I made by myself. I could choose what to make, and exactly how I would make it.
There I was, feet on brown-orange-ochre linoleum of Rorschach splotches on a grid of squares, a chair nudged against the counter, teaching myself how to cook. I climbed up and got to work, sawing the crusts off whole wheat bread with a butter knife, then layering the bread with margarine, iceberg lettuce, and ham. No amount of squishing could tame the skyscraper into a log, so I started over, mashing the margarine-smeared slice with my fingers and topping it with one bruised lettuce leaf and a ragged piece of ham. Thanks to half a box of toothpicks, I managed to hack the log into four rounds.
With a plate in each hand, I teetered down the hallway, down the steps and down to the basement where my parents were watching TV. I expected unbridled praise and maybe some confetti. They said thanks. As I was cleaning up, I realized I hadn’t washed the lettuce and spent the rest of the night petrified that I’d poisoned my parents.
It took me a long time to understand that Chinese people don’t say “I love you,” like all the white people do on sitcoms. Instead, we stock each other’s fridges, make twice as much food as needed, and insist that everyone has just one more bite. Maybe that’s why cooking has been a salve during the most challenging times in my life. Other people run marathons or scale mountains. I take refuge in the kitchen and emerge days, months, sometimes years later having levelled up as a human being.
Cooking is an intimate act — the process of investing your life force into something about to be consumed. I try to remember that at five o’clock, during a sliver of time when my head is still in my home office and my hands are rifling through the fridge. Cooking for a family can feel thankless and relentless, an exercise in Venn diagrams. Here are the things my husband will eat. Here are the things my daughter will eat. Where am I in all this? Good question.
It’s easy to lose myself in the tedium of endless chores, and the truth is, they distract me from the discomfort I feel as a parent. I’ve cooked for Nordic royalty and made desserts for the James Beard Awards. But I don’t know how to be a parent any more than I know how to cook for a two-year-old. And I really don’t know how to cook with a two-year-old.
I muddle through as best I can. And on some days I say, “Do you want to help me make dinner?”
While my daughter pushes a dining room chair into the kitchen, I assemble an arsenal of bowls and utensils. On goes the pint-sized apron, stitched with a beaming sun that says “Good Morning!” Here is the washed asparagus, a baking sheet, and a small bowl.
I watch her hands as she works. I picture Lilliputian kittens napping on the pads of her fingers. At the height of baby puddingness, each of her forearms was lined with three deep folds, like she was made of marshmallows. Now there’s just a crease at her wrist. How long before the dimples disappear from her knuckles?
In a few months she’ll be three, and I don’t know how to raise a three-year-old any more than I do a two-year-old. So here I am, feet on cool, white stone tiles, a chair nudged against the counter, learning how to cook again.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of Edible Vancouver & Wine Country. Many thanks to Debbra Mikaelsen and Viktoria Cseh for editing.
