taste buds

Celine Wei Bitter

I’m told your taste buds change every seven years. Science says they turn over every two weeks. For me, some tastes stay the same, even as they take on deeper profiles.

The hot summer day dries our sheets. Right next to our washing machine, a stove sizzles away, sitting where a dryer would. Hot Texas air circulates in and out of our house. It’s a dry heat. The sky is endless and unflinchingly blue while cicadas provide a soundtrack to this afternoon. I look out into our garden where rose bushes line the fence behind vegetables and melons. My eyes track a rabbit darting across the yard while a light wind rustles our date tree and fetches the fragrant scent of freshpicked chives. Inside, my grandma’s knife chops rhythmically. Soon, I’ll help knead the dough and crush garlic with a mortar and pestle. I sneak a bite of cooked pork. My misshaped dumplings snuggle up to hers. Soon after, the steam rises, and a juicy taste fills my mouth. An old bottle of rice wine is opened. My brother and I wince at the smell. My family’s loud laughter fills the room and I’m filled with the white noise of happiness.

Later, when I’m tucked in, my grandpa sits beside me in an old chair smelling of Tiger Balm. He’s coaxing me to drink the medicinal concoction he calls ‘tea’ where dregs of herbs and roots float inside. He laughs when I make a face. It’s bitter like nothing else. He’s telling me an old story. There’s a temple on an old mountain. In that temple is a room. In that room is a table. On that table is a cup. Drinking the cup is an old monk. He tells an old story. That story starts with an old mountain… (you get the picture). He laughs when I complain, but I’m not really annoyed. If everyone’s laughing, I’m okay. I drift away. I grow without even trying.

One day, I brew my own tea, and my muffled laughter becomes someone else’s happiness. I’m in college. I’m just in time for lunch and FaceTime my grandparents a time zone away. All I’ve consumed today is a bitter iced coffee to ward away the sticky North Carolinian humidity. I sit in my room and tell them about the dry frozen dumplings in our dining hall that aren’t nearly as juicy. I tell them about the overly saccharine night my friends and I spent confessing our secrets waiting for the sunrise. I tell them about the testing anxiety and sourness seeing my peers excel without visibly struggling. I’m technically an adult now too, but my grandparent’s lives feel unknowable. They grew up on rice and rain and knew little beyond the borders of their hometown. But for now, I’m just in time. The windows fog up, becoming dreamy and clouded, the world outside unclear and full of choices. Nothing makes sense looking forward, but I have thirty minutes of no overthinking. We’re going just the right speed. I’m in time to be their granddaughter. I’m in time to have lunch. I’m in time thousands of miles away.

It’s summer again and my older sister just got married, family members flying in from China with heat and laughter in the air. I’m old enough to drink rice wine, but my grandma has lost too many teeth to eat anything but porridge and soup dumplings. My grandpa still drinks the same tea everyday, but can no longer tell the temple story without getting confused. Later, I get a voicemail from him. He wants to get a meal soon.

I’m too busy studying for the MCAT, but maybe in a week. Days later I’m in the emergency room. There’s a salty wetness behind my mask and a bitter taste in my chest. But eventually, there will be laughter.

Cold Burn

what is family if not the first place you run from? a burning house: scorched air, smoke-filled with citrus and sandalwood. i think, the heat is wrong, while cowering in the shade no brim large enough to hide my scarred face. a moon hangs over the planet stuck in a self-destructive spin (debris in the way only daughters can be) and one day, the moon will rotate out of this deadly embrace flinging itself into the cosmos and escaping the inevitable explosion of the Sun. sitting in the ashes of the burnt husk of a house i now own a better view of the rising moon. but drifting through cold space (afraid of losing the peace i worked so hard to achieve), i wonder, is this really the future i was hoping for? and so i split another pear with myself peel an orange without any mental division swallow section by section. sour is sweet’s uglier, more interesting sister. sour has pride in its ability to hurt and spice burns hot while sour burns cold. tomato egg

“The real issue is that shadow of yours. It’s a bit…how do I put it politely? Faint. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were playing tricks, but in my book, that’s about half the shadow you’re supposed to have.”

I continue tracing a path back along rusted train tracks through the dense patch of forest I found myself lost in, a piece of untouched land that had been up for sale for at least a decade in hopes of enticing real estate investors or city planners. Instead, the sleepy southern suburb didn’t see the same amount of growth it had hoped (and promised), infrastructure aging and opportunities drying at an accelerated rate, especially for those arriving for a fresh start.

It’s not quite a ghost, but certainly not something belonging to this world. I refuse to speak to it, my mother always telling me not to engage with my grandpa’s Chinese opera folk tales from the old country, ranging from flesh-eating shapeshifters to ancestors stuck in limbo. Not when cold, hard science was what brought us to the land of opportunity in the first place. Who had time for ghosts when all fear and anxiety had to go towards putting food on the table?

“Take a page from an elder, we’re all done for if you lose your shadow. Some might see it as burdensome, but how else will you stay rooted? A rich history comes with an even heavier responsibility.”

In the corner of my eye, I see it start to coalesce as it grows angrier, facial features twisting into scorn. Familiarly furrowed eyebrows and a downturned grimace shared by half my extended family, who I’ve only seen in pictures, come into clarity. I shake my head and start humming nursery rhymes, singing all 50 states in alphabetical order, and reciting a mnemonic for the Declaration of Independence.

“Oh, I know this next one: life, liberty, hirsute happiness. Easy. You hairy Americans love grandstanding about all your hopes and dreams but know near nothing about sacrifice. It’s all rice cookers with cute melodies, what happened to toiling at the paddies and burning your tongue at the canteens?”

There’s another break in the canopy, and I start to feel something rearrange itself under my skin and start to settle. I take deep breaths as the sun beats down on me like temple monks rhythmically bearing down on drums. My heart thumps in unison. I had long shed my down jacket as the sun rose higher in the sky, along with the phone, the compass, the hatchet, the matchbox, and the past. I felt lighter.

“You should consider how your shadow feels about it. It might have a bit of an inferiority complex. If I happened to be a shadow, I could imagine it’d be real crummy to be half of what I should be.”

Blocking out the chatter from the ghost, I walk away from where my shadow points. I pick up the pace, the trees getting sparser, and I wonder if I’m not going in the wrong direction.

“Don’t turn round now, doll face. You know you’d never get home if you only retrace your steps. Vectors point forward, trains travel east to west, even homing geese only go in one direction to find their new nest. Entropy increases, the ten thousand diasporas never coagulate, and there’s no easy way back to the Middle Kingdom.” It cackles.

I finally break my silence. “I don’t want to go back to the Middle Kingdom, I just can’t miss dinner. It’s tomato egg tonight.”

I break past the tree line. So does it. And one day, I’ll succumb to the possibility that I will never be rid of this ghost, sitting in the dark with my glasses off and blasting my mind out with loud music and even spicier food just to drown out any coherent thought, another mark on an endless chalkboard of limitations.

It’s quick to point out, “Apathy is a choice, not a coping mechanism.”

“Why can’t it be both?” I half-heartedly respond.

“To do nothing, according to Lao Tzu, is an activist’s assertion. To do nothing, according to Martin Luther King, is a ticket to our own destruction. You see, moral apathy hides even less than good intentions.”

At this point, we’re old hands at the whole bickering thing. I wave away the apparition while remarking, “Chill out, I’m an American. Don’t you know that an unexamined life is worth living and worth living well?”

Perhaps as time goes on and when I finally confess to the ghost about my unbearable isolation, how much I’ve given up just for a moment of acceptance, its face with my family’s features will fade away as memory fades. Like glass exposed to sunlight, it’ll take on a duller, yellow tint. All might dissolve into the white cloud-vault of history, blending into the tunes of a massive and eclectic playlist. One day, my shadow would completely disappear, freeing me to float out into the atmosphere, momentum from the Big Bang pushing me to drift in the far reaches of the expanding universe. The ghost would shrug, sighing disappointedly before chalking it up to a lack of filial piety, globalization, maybe even just cloud cover before leaving. And I’d miss the ghost’s presence.