Note: This tidbit is part of a story I was working on during the first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020. At the time, we were all worried about food shortages and a crisis of resources. The news of bodies piled high outside hospitals in New York and Italy certainly made it feel as though we were very close to the end of all things. Looking back, I suppose it's fitting that I started playing with a story about a Chinese family trying to survive a post-apocalyptic scenario. I thought that if I wrote a story that was truly dire, my current reality wouldn't seem so bad. Art influencing life, perhaps. I never did write any more of this story. Should I pick it up again?
Every Chinese child knows that love is never spoken. It is cooked, offered, and stuffed down our throats.
Barbeque pork buns? (I want to fill you up.)
Eat a little more. (I’m giving you my heart.)
Have you eaten yet? (Does your stomach gnaw at you like my heart claws for yours?)
In the days before Day Zero, we’d playfully toss around our cravings because we could actually satisfy them. It was a game we played constantly. One of us would get obsessed with the idea of a food – and hound the other until we set out together to obtain it.
Red and fiery mapo tofu. Crispy-chewy pan-fried dumplings with black vinegar and chili oil. Creamy bubble milk tea. Rendang beef curry over coconut rice. Comforting pho with miles of rice noodles and steaming broth. Our imaginary menus were endless and fun, meant to inspire our next adventure and promise delight.
Only, it wasn’t just Asian foods that simmered in our brains. We drooled over everything from fragrant tikka masala and soak-it-up butter naan to fall-apart Jamaican jerk chicken and plantains. Sometimes we felt like heavenly garlic-oregano Greek lamb and potatoes with a dollop of tart tzatziki. Other days, it was our regional specialty of poutine with just the right amount of gooey curds and gravy over a bed of robust, fresh-cut fries.
(But I have to stop here – just thinking about it all makes me quake.)
Then when the end came, we allowed ourselves to fantasize like this out of habit as though we had the ability to satisfy our cravings. It wasn’t until the wrenching in our guts pulled tears from our eyes that we realized our innocent food-dreaming was a bygone privilege. Reality held us hostage while our remembrance quickly soured into torture. We stopped dreaming then.
These days, we only eat when absolutely necessary, and the thought of mealtimes gives me no joy or sense of gleeful anticipation as it once did. For where there was abundance is now an accelerating void. And the house, once over-full with value-bought goods, is growing hollow. Cupboards previously shining with neatly-stacked cans, boxes, and sacks of rice are now looking gaunt and toothy, where shadows now occupy spaces once filled with food.
We have buried our yearnings now: Better to let desire die than to have it claw at our bellies. The purpose now is to eat and live.
Anita is in the kitchen stirring a pot of congee, or rice soup. Her son, Tom, tiptoes over the stove to peer into its sludgy white depths. Big amber orbs pop out of a mop of glossy brown hair and pecan-frosting skin.
She hands me a small bowl of congee with a small chunk of canned dace floating on top. I gaze at the salty morsel staring blindly back at me like a pupil in the centre of my all-seeing rice soup.
The humble rice soup, said to be the mortar of the Great Wall. I poke it with my spoon in search of the scant grains in the milky-white broth. Every day, the congee gets thinner and thinner, and I wonder (I probably shouldn’t), how much longer we have till it just turns into water.
I eat slowly to feel the lumps slide down my throat and land with a thud in my belly. I eat slowly to satisfy the now and to hold back the future from coming.
Every mouthful keeps me from starvation.
Every mouthful leads us to starvation.
“Don’t worry,” my sister says. She’s read my mind, because these thoughts prey on her too. “We’ll find more.”
I look up at her between sips, white soup glossing my lips. But will we? Our minds only operate within what we knew before Day Zero, a North American middle-class worldview of constant plenty that hadn’t changed even during a harsh recession ten years ago or our country’s recent trade war with China. Not really. We’ve never been through something as bad as this, where the cogs of the world stopped turning and everything just . . . ended.
I don’t tell her this, but I mutter what our mother used to say to soften the edge of our wants when we were small.
“When the time comes,” I say like a well-worn path.
Anita nods. “When the time comes,” she repeats. “Now, eat.”
