Category: Story Vault

What food is your home?

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Photo by Cats Coming on Pexels.com

Food is not just enjoyment. It’s history, geography, emotion, environment, relationship, memory, creativity, dream, reality…


I’m privileged enough in life that I’ve never starved. It was very sad for me during the period of time when I only had food to avoid hunger, when I chose to eat little to avoid gaining weight.


It all changed for even worse when I discovered that my mother had cancer.


I had to eat. Food became my safety net. As long as I could get my hands on the things I liked to eat, I ate them all.


Food could save me. Because I had a wonderful relationship with it when i was a kid. Because my mother was the best cook in the whole world.


She made these hand-pulled noodles that were just “home” to me. There are only flour and water in the dough. So the proportion of it all is the most crucial. When it’s done well, a layer of cooked oil is brushed on it. Then we wait for ten to fifteen minutes. Then we can cut them into strips and start pulling…


The water boiling… first round was for Papa. Then for me. Then the last was for my mom.
Then we would take our bowl of noodles and mix them with some cooked dishes, like Chinese version of spaghetti. We call it “Gan Ban”. It means “dry stir”. We literally stir the noodles together with the vegetables and sometimes meat cubes that belong to the dish. Then we add some vinegar, a little soy sauce if needed, and chilli paste and chilli oil. Stir, stir, stir. If the end result is too dry, we add a little cooked noodle water. But be careful. We would never add too much noodle water until it became a soup.


Stir, stir, stir.


Then we taste our own noodles. If it’s good, we can start our meal. If something’s missing, we add it however we’d like.


For some mysterious reason, mom’s noodles always tasted better than mine. So we always exchanged our bowls in the end.


My mom was not “creative” in the kitchen in a traditional sense. She had mastered something and make a good eater out of me. I’m not a picky eater and I have never been. But I have a high standard for what I find tasty and satisfying.


The people who love food are the ones who love life. My mom made me into someone who loves life through food, experiences life through food, explores the world through food. My mom loved life. So do I.

What food is your home?

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Role-playing life

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The adult life sometimes feels like a role-playing game. A small part of you is wondering when your mom is going to call out “dinner’s ready!” so you can just stop playing and go home. At the dinner table, while listening half-heartedly to your parents talking about their work, you think about how you could have played better today, and how you plan to play tomorrow, or another day.

Her timed work is timeless

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I came across Alexa Meade’s work recently. Her works have the surprising effects and I’m sure I’ve already seen some of them on my social media feed somewhere.

Alexa Meade challenges our perception of art by turning the relation between life and painting to the opposite direction. Art usually means “coming from life”; life informing art. But she managed to show us there’s the possibility to something opposite, something new: art can come to life, literally.

Life imitating art.

Meanwhile, every piece of her work is not just three-dimensional, but four. There’s a time element that’s crucial in her work process. The painting is done on models who are there, on site. They will be there as an existence that is only there for a period of time. And that time is the main part of her artistic work. What remains afterwards – the photos, the memories of the viewer who were there, the making-of videos like this one – is, again, only the description of her work. Her work is timed in that way.

But her work is also timeless. In a society where everything, especially ourselves and experience can be commodified or materialised, Meade’s work challenges our perception of our own existence. Can we live in a painting that’s more beautiful like a dream than our own life?

Meade creates the “canvas” in the three-dimensional space, and puts her objects on that canvas and paints over them to make them fit into that seemingly two-dimensional space.

Alexa Meade’s work reminds me of the work of Johannes Stoetter.

Both artists use painting on human body to create illusions. Both artists wow their viewers by challenge their perception of “what they see = what is” to “what they see = what it can be”. Their works are memorable and timeless.

How we can try to challenge ourselves and our viewers with our work?

What we can we challenge to understand and appreciate?

What can we break to preserve?

Genre vs. Idiosyncrasy

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Genre is like an index. You are put there so people can find you. We always need to think about how others can find us. How they can hear us, can see us.

When they do, it’s what only we have that keeps the right people around.

Genre is a labeled box.

Genre is a platform.

Genre is a stage.

Genre is index.

Genre is an opportunity given by the stability of an ecosystem.

But in the core, genre is the part of what you do that shares with a bunch of other people’s work. It’s the general theme that connects different paths.

Idiosyncrasy is the reason for people to stare, linger, and stay.

Idiosyncrasy is the texture, the smell, the waves on the surface of a still lake.

Idiosyncrasy can be a disruption, too, when it’s strong enough. When it’s so disruptive that others might follow your lead, so that they will need to make another genre for you.

But idiosyncrasy is also going to be the reason why you are remembered for being who you are.

I think the way I’m putting it makes everything daunting to me. My first reaction was like “I will never be able to ‘disrupt’ anything”, “oh gosh I don’t want to put that much pressure on myself!”

But the way to do it should be simple, right?

I’m learning to sound like myself. I’m learning to listen to how I sound like when I’m being myself. But the answer always appears where I’m not looking. Not to sound too “Asian mysterious”, but “sounding like yourself” is something that you can only find when you are not actively looking for.

So I’m just reading, and writing.

I’m figuring out what I like, what I don’t like. I’m writing by imitating the things I like, avoiding the things that turn me off, believing one day I will be able to say: “This is me. This is how I sound like. This is what makes me remarkable.”

The last one to go to bed

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I guess I will be the last one goes to bed. Forever.

Sometimes I do think it feels unfair. Why do I always have to be the one who is making sure everything and everyone is ok before turning in or just resting herself?

But on the other hand, it’s my own choice, too.

I choose to do all these things. I don’t do it perfectly but somehow I feel I have the responsibility to do it.

Is it a sexist thing to do? I mean, am I conditioned to do that and behave like the responsible adult in the newly established family which consists of two adult at the same age and a little baby?

I was not like this at all. What changed?

I was the person who’s taking care of her own shit but now I leave everything to my husband. What changed?

Well, I have him now.

I leave the things in my life that he does better. I take care of the things which he overlooks.

I guess that’s just teamwork.

I guess not everything has to be a sexist thing.

I guess I’m certainly conditioned in many ways. But it doesn’t always have to be that way.

(Un)thankful

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I’m a new mother. I’m 24/7 now fully on my baby daughter. I’m not ashamed to say I get annoyed often and wonder why I wanted to be a mother from time to time.

These moments come and go. They don’t stay in my mind longer than an hour. In terms of any relationship, this is an extreme short period of “off” time.

We are social animals. Of course, every relationship with anyone in our life is a “relationship”. Why should “mother and child” an exception?

I feel the need to write this because I was told to “never think of things like this and be thankful.”

I hate it when older women say this to me. And they say it a lot. Like a mantra.

“…be thankful. Be grateful.

You are suffering? Don’t. Just be thankful…”

This is the kind of crap I have to get out of my life. Because I don’t need to be thankful for shitty things that happen to me, or traumas I have to live through, or sufferings that I am experiencing.

I’m not a victim and I don’t need to be thankful for the things I’m not thankful for.

Regret

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I think I made my eyes worse so that I could wear glasses.

I was 12. I had no idea it was a bad idea.

There were only a handful of kids in my class who wore glasses. Out headmaster, an old, respected woman also did. And my father also. That were probably the reasons why I wanted to wear glasses too.

Well, primarily for the first reason.

Wearing glasses was a scarcity for me. I really thought it was cool to have a little glasses case. When the class started, I could get the case out, open it, and put my glasses on.

Like… a professional looking.

Then I came to high school and the coolest kids I knew were all free of glasses. And I already couldn’t read the whiteboard without my glasses.

What seemed cool changes. So never make an important choice for it if you can’t go back.

The mirror

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I’ve never been a person who’d stand in front of a mirror and inspecting her face often.

It was not just because I was not 100% satisfied with how I look. (“How stupid is that? I know… but it’s the problem for another time…) Plus, I was raised that way.

Most children I’ve seen have such a phase: they like to see themselves in a mirror. They can’t help themselves but looking at their reflections. They make faces, or try on household items like a pretty pillow cases or something on their heads… (What? Is that just me?)

I was one of these children.

There’s a big mirror in the hall way of the apartment of my grandparents, where I spent most of my childhood. It’s facing the apartment door and right in the center of the T section connecting all the other rooms. Since I was in kindergarten, I was good at doing performances like singing and dancing. Every adult said to my parents and grandparents that I was talented and very cute. Hearing that, I spent even more time making faces and pretending I was in a movie scene and appreciating my own performance in front of that mirror.

While other adults in my family making comments about me being “crazy in love with how I look”. They didn’t want to make me self-conscious on purpose. But they way they said it made me feel that looking at myself is something bad.

It’s self-indulgent, self-obsessed, shallow, and narcissistic.

Gradually, I stopped. When I passed by the mirror, I tried not to look at myself in the mirror; or when I did, I tried to do it without anyone seeing me.

My two cousins, who are boys, did the same. They got the same comment. And worse. “You have it worse than girls… so self-obsessed with appearance. Are you a girl?” The grownups said to them.

My mother was no advocate for a good and polished self-image.
She was very beautiful and everybody said so. But she seldom put on makeup and she said she was “too lazy” to take care of her skin. Oh, and makeup meant “lipsticks” for her. That’s all. In her family, caring about one’s own appearances is so bad that it’s like a crime. There was no mirror in her childhood home. She had to go to the bathroom in school to see if she had dirt on her face if no one told her before that.

When I went to college, my two best girlfriends from high school told me about what they’ve learnt in their first semester. One said: “I’m able to put on smoky eye makeup in 5 minutes.” The other one said: “I discovered how to re-apply my makeup quickly in this very humid climate… thank God!” I said: “I think I haven’t washed my face for the last three days… since I had no class and I just stayed in my dorm, watching movies and writing. And if I want to look at myself in the mirror, I will have to go to the shared bathroom for the whole floor…”

I took pride in that.

Because I value inner beauty more. I value knowledge, wisdom. I’m not shallow, not self-obsessed. Even if people tell me I’m pretty, I don’t look at myself in the mirror anymore because I’m just so not image-obsessed that I even get offended by thinking about my skin problem.

It backfired.

It turned out that, when I did notice my appearance and started to get self-conscious about almost everything with my body. And what made it worse? Feeling judged by others and by myself for I felt ashamed even by looking at the mirror.

Not anymore.

For years I was insecure with my body and my face. My body was not toned and my skin is not smooth. When I started living abroad, far away from my family, I started to look myself in the mirror and judge myself for being “not good enough” and then for “caring about appearance too much.”

Pregnancy changed everything for me. Because I was absolutely in love with my changing body. I can’t explain how it happened. One day I woke up, went to the bathroom, turned on the light.

There I was.

I didn’t know how great I would look with a big baby belly. People say it’s the hormones. But thank God the hormones stayed because I still like how I look now.

I’m back to my pre-pregnancy weight, but I have a belly still hanging. It was a sweet home for my baby daughter for 37 weeks and it’s perfect as how it is. It was never really about my body or my face. It was simply my relationship with the body. The vessel.

Now I still don’t look at my face closely every day in the mirror. But I always keep showing my baby our faces every time when we pass our mirror in the hallway. Yes, we’ve got a mirror there, too. It’s at the corner which you will definitely pass by on the way to the bathroom. Every time when we walk by, I would stop and make faces to her in the mirror. She always laughs after staring at her own face and mine in there for a while.

She still thinks it’s another baby. And that baby is her friend now.
We are all her friends.