Soy Sauce for Beginners

by Kirstin Chen

Suddenly I questioned why I so indiscriminately craved the approval of others.

He thought I was just really turned on, but that wasn’t it: I’d awakened a longing I could not control, an awareness of the spaces he could not fill.

Over half a century removed from British colonial rule, our nation’s lingering fascination with the West manifested itself in larger-than-life billboards of Caucasian and Eurasian models, in local newscasters’ approximations of the Queen’s English, in whole airplanes filled with students heading to universities abroad.

I wondered if he could see us for who we were: a pair of women, trying to take care of themselves and each other, falling short time and again.