Memories in the Winds

By Yaying Zhao

I never really reminisce much about my great-grandma, but she is my spring. On particularly sunny days, when pollen still works to infiltrate arctic winds, I catch myself expecting a steaming metal plate of transparent-skinned dumplings at the end of the road.

Great-grandma was mostly a label to a face during weddings, reunions and Chinese New Year. As with various immigrants raised on old traditions, her love language was food. Despite the fact that most of our interactions were characterized by her lectures and my glazed eyes, I knew one thing was for sure. Like clockwork, during a span of three weeks sometime between late winter and early spring, she would begin preparing for “fun guo” season. With my mom and grandma, a day would be set aside for dumpling making. The result of that day would always be boxes upon boxes of circular tins piled on top of the mahogany table. The transparent-skinned dumplings were best warm and straight out of the steamer but somehow tasted the same when left sitting out for hours.

When she eventually got too weak with age, the fun guos became yet another tradition lost to time. She passed away a few years after, and I eventually mustered up the courage to ask my mom if she could make some fun guos for me. Although I was presented with a nearly identical-looking plate of dumplings, the first bite told me something was different. While they were still delicious, there was taro where there should have been kohlrabi. The skin also wasn’t as shiny or chewy as the ones from my childhood. I’ve grown accustomed to my mother’s version, but the occasional smell of Callery pear tree blossoms from the NYC streets will always bring me back to the woman who spoke with her mountain of transparent-skinned dumplings.

By Rui Zheng

I dream in anticipation of not being me – r.

My dreams are always a little too real; I wake up disoriented, unable to differentiate memory from imagination.

I’m not someone who mulls over their dreams often — unless they’re particularly outrageous, but that’s rare. My dreamscapes tend to be peaceful, idyllic — located in grassy fields or blocks of a small town. I sit and walk and talk with my friends, one or two or a few, but sometimes I’m alone, and that’s okay too. It’s just a regular day, but so much more beautiful.

I wake up thinking it’s Thursday; I lived Wednesday already. But no, no, I have a class — now! I’m late. The lecture is eerily similar to the one from last night. All that professor’s lectures sound the same. I let my imagined Wednesday slip as my mind merges back into reality.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m gullible, my mind almost dangerously malleable, especially regarding spoken words. Once there are enough degrees of separation between now and then, the past becomes a sort of dreamscape too. In conversation, I wonder:

Did you say this? Did you do this?

Did you?

Did you?

Did you?

Or did my subconscious speak for you all those weeks or months or years before?

In times of extreme stress, my dreamscapes transform into nightmarish, larger-than-life sequences, teetering on the line between terrifying and horrifying. I don’t know how my mind sends tingles throughout my skin at the sight of a spider but manages to stay oddly calm when I’m faced with giant robot earth-wolves intent on destroying the crust on which I stand. And when I’m a mind-reading bird getting mistakenly operated on. And when I’m the subject of an elaborate murder plot involving a pet tiger and ivory stairs. I accept my fate and go along with it all.

Better to have no control at all than to have it and get a front-row seat to the prospect of failure.

People let sleep consume them in order to escape, but my conscious never allows me to rest. My mind works hyperactively, exhausting me preemptively, so all that’s left is the staticky buzz of what I dream to be.