Mother
by Angel Xin
One.
Mom wakes up a little before six to whisk the eggs with brown tarnished chopsticks instead of forks until the yoke dissipates into the whites but then she often says that there is always a vice versa. She adds in a teaspoon of milk and a teaspoon of salt and then scrambles the eggs, trying to mimic the way Gordon Ramsay elegantly folds his. And then she says that it’s too runny, too raw, too unsafe, and then she hands me a hard-boiled egg and a tiny bowl of soy sauce. And so, home smells like soy sauce. See, soy runs through my blood the same way sugar fills up theirs, rushing towards the heart to tell it to keep pushing, to remind the rest of the body Soy will always be here with you. Home is wherever you are.
Two.
Mom reacted to the A- dangling from my bed-side table the same way she read the name Chai Tea Latte on the Starbucks menu– the face people make after drinking sugar-free-zero-fat yogurt for the first time in their lives, the expression when they realize that even chobani can taste like water: Expected, but slight, almost absent. She had the same eyes and brows in the evening when she sipped her cup of hot tea as I poured sugar into mine, for sugared tea is Iced tea just as sweetened soy sauce is Kecap Manis. I disliked the bitter aftertaste of oolong. Mom said that it’s unheard of to generalize tea, that Da Hong Pao and Tie Guan Yin are two sides of a coin, similar enough to be grouped together as one. Unlike Honey Citrus Mint Tea, which tastes the same before and after you sip– less diverse yet closer to the American Dream– every batch of oolong holds a distinct tone. But despite her tacitly displayed disappointment (sometimes), she never mistook me as the singular minus sign on my transcript. Perhaps it’s because she knows that I’m already deep in the swamp. But she’s always in the swamp alongside me, acting as anti-gravity. Because I will always be here with you, she whispers after the bedtime stories. Home is wherever she is.
Three
Mom smells more like butter than congee as she stirred the boiling pot of pork and rice and century egg while buttering the pan on her left to sear the burger patty and bacon and scrambled eggs, trying to learn the new and keep the old and so the pan burned. But then she did the same thing the next day: flipping the pancakes while heating up the dim sums, trying to merge my palette into her own but I really do love the boiling soup that fills up the dimsums most. Because I know that she will always be here with me, even in taste. Even when it’s hard. Home is wherever she is.
Four.
Mom says 事不过三 (meaning any mistake made more than three times should not be tolerated)-- so there are no four. But then she forces the giant puffer jacket on my shoulder like always, after I told her for the three thousandth time no, I’m not cold. We were building a snowman amidst the streets of Manhattan the same way we built the sandman on the banks of the Sanya shores, and the same way we built ourselves upon the American dream inside our apartment ten thousand miles away. And we now call all three home. Just as I always tell her: Home is wherever you are.