Food Fight
Grandma was born in 1892 in a village south of Shanghai, the name of which has been lost to family history. It might be Wuzhen, now a tourist trap known for its picturesque canals and cunningly wrought wooden houses. It might be some other no-name village set at water’s edge. When Grandma was a child, she was told to fetch a pail of water for her younger sister to drink. The sister died and Grandma was blamed for her death. There are many villages in China that could have caused a child’s death just as there are many stories I could tell about Grandma. The one I want to tell today is about food.
Grandma had three sons. The oldest, Robert, served as an officer in the Chinese Nationalist Army while the youngest, Victor, became a professional gambler and was never discussed in front of us kids. Dad was the middle son, a handsome lug of a guy without a devious bone in his body. As such, he was no match for Mom, which was her central crime in Grandma’s eyes. Grandma and Mom recognized each other as worthy opponents and so, every night at the dinner table, they clashed using Grandma’s weapon of choice.
Whatever it was that Mom cooked, Grandma found fault with it. Scrambled eggs with tomatoes, beef with bean sprouts, winter melon soup, any kind of fish, Grandma would intone the correct recipe as if she had made it every day. But back in Shanghai, Grandma had employed a cook for the family meals, restaurant chefs for more formal occasions, and a private rickshaw driver to convey her across Shanghai to supervise the purchase of food. If Grandma had ever touched a piece of raw food, it would have been to fling it in the face of the hapless seller.
Red-braised pork shoulder should be cooked over a low flame, she proclaimed, lovingly lacquered in a glaze of soy and rock sugar, so tender that the fatty skin renders into unctuousness and the meat submits to your tongue. Whereas my mother’s pork shoulder, Grandma would point out, was so dry that it must have been a cheap cut.
I didn’t know at this point in time that Grandma had never cooked until she came to the United States. I didn’t know yet that the same was true for Mom. My parents had each grown up in circumstances unimaginably luxurious by the standards I knew, a memory of the past carefully tended to flourish in the garden of the unfortunate present. I didn’t realize how our home in the exurbs of Southern California had been carefully curated to mirror that past, from the way in which watermelon seeds were served during mahjong parties to the food my mother served us every night. I was unaware of the past, hardly conscious of the present, but I am also the eldest child. I recognize resentment when I taste it.
While my mother and grandmother battled for preeminence, we children were not expected to speak, let alone defend. We were cudgels for Grandma to wield, examples of failed genes inherited from Mom’s side of the family, proof of how badly Mom cooked as measured by the slowness of our eating.
I have always been a slow eater though it is hard to know whether this was the cause or the effect of Grandma’s words. How does a child show allegiance by the motion of her jaws? How could I not flinch with every barb Grandma launched into my mother’s soft underbelly until she drew blood? Grandma wanted us to choose sides and so I did.
Grandma died at age 93 on the operating table, her intestines consumed by cancer. By then, I was living in DC and said I could not afford the flight home for the funeral. Dad did not press me and neither did Mom. Neither of them recognized my choice as the latest salvo in an ongoing food fight.
During the 2020 US election cycle, I began to grind my teeth. This was the summer Dad died, the first year of the pandemic, when I was having trouble chewing anything firmer than a tomato. I self-medicated using Dad’s Perio-Aid mouthwash in the hope of easing my swollen gums. There was nothing I wanted to eat and little that I could.
Grandma used to keep her dentures in a glass beside her bed. That permanently sour look to her lips as if a spoon of rice vinegar had somehow slipped past her guard. The pain she must have felt every time she chewed. Dad was just like that towards the end.
And so Mom abandoned her rules about salt and Sichuan peppers and saturated fats. She cooked him his favorite dish, red-braised pork shoulder. She didn’t tut when he reached first for the skin steeped in star anise, cinnamon, ginger, and scallions. Once he gobbled down all the fatty skin, he turned to the meat, chopstick tender, which he sucked on to extract all the umami flavor. The stringy wads of exsanguinated flesh he left on his plate. Once he finished it all, he would say as he always did that Mom doesn’t know how to properly cook red-braised pork shoulder.
I recognize the old clarion call but now I am old and wary enough to know that there is nothing to be gained by choosing sides, especially this late in the game. I fish with my chopsticks for any last bits Dad might have missed and I chew them down as best I can.
