Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

When I guide international students in making s’mores in our backyard, their first crumbly, decadent bite breaking into a sticky smile—no institution hovering over us—it’s so clear we are learning how to make joy for ourselves, for one another.

When my sons, now fourteen and seventeen, had their first bite of solid food (bananas), my heart almost knocked out of my chest. I was ecstatic: bite by massive bite, they smiled so big at this new creamy, scrummy taste. Each day felt like a new adventure to try: Sweet potatoes? Yes. Pureed carrots? More. Peas? Okay, hold up, wait a hot minute—let’s figure this one out.

For what is home if not the first place where you learn what does and does not nourish you? The first place you learn to sit still and slow down when someone offers you a bite to eat?

What we think about food is a portal into our own personal histories, ourselves—and most lovely of all, it’s a chance to deepen our connection with others.

The Malay word for hair is rambut, and it’s only fitting that the fruit with the wildest curly spinterns radiating from its bright scarlet skin—like a tiny red wig fit for the creepiest of clowns—would be named rambutan.

I wish someone had told young Aimee that even though it didn’t seem like it in these teeny rural towns, black hair is the most common hair color in the world.

No one asks the rambutan about its messy hair. They just know that if you want a rambutan, you’re gonna have to deal with the wild and unruly spinterns.

But when I see a bowlful of rambutan I’m reminded of the untamed and messy spinterns. I’m reminded of my quiet and delicate grandmother, wrapped in tissue-thin elegant saris but who, in her housedress at night, would take her long hair out of her tight braid and let those ringlets unspool and unspool down her shoulders, a dark waterfall across her back.

Anything good comes from India according to my father: swirls of calligraphy, counting, the darkest purest gold hammered into rings and loopy bangles, paprika, and web-thin silks that sent hundreds of pirates in a frenzied search to the East. But mangoes My mother doesn’t buy it. She says The Queen Fruit of her beloved islands came from a tree growing in the spot where a Filipina named Melanga pierced her heart through with a knife.

President Bush said if India finally allowed Harleys to be sold in its competitive market for motorbikes, he’d allow Alphonso mangoes to be sold in America. And to the delight of my parents and hundreds of thousands of immigrants especially, the ban on Alphonso mangoes was lifted.

While I was learning how to nourish and care for another while he was still forming inside of me, I offered up the fruit that was offered up to me by both of my parents when they found some (much to their delight) in a grocery store in the suburbs or small-town America. The fruit that was always offered up to me by my grandparents in India and the Philippines when they were still here walking among us.

Legend has it pawpaws were one of George Washington’s favorite desserts, and I wonder which enslaved person was the first to slice one open and slide out the seeds for the tongue that carved out whole battle stratagems in his sleep. And what did that servant dream of, and could they remember that dark color in their dreams sometimes, and did that mean a happy dream or one that woke them in a sweat?

O let me time travel to any of those sweet years, let me say yes to him more often. Especially over the little things, like a pack of M&M’S on the checkout line. A tiny flashlight. O don’t let him hold a grudge for all the hundreds of times I told him no. Let him remember as he’s walking to and from his classes the thousands and thousands of times I told him yes.

Those are some of the dearest moments of my childhood: the exquisite glee and butterflies in my tummy while performing some rudimentary choreographed routine with a lumpia in each hand, like tiny batons for that little girl. And when the song was over, applause would erupt from the edges of the party, and then I’d bite and crunch all the lumpia I could. Why did I somehow forget that elation, those dances, when I was fourteen?

This is the apology of all apologies to my parents for ever being embarrassed of our food.

Because in watching people who I considered dear pals not even try something so lovingly made with my mother’s hands, I gained pride instead. I think I had just one slice of pizza. The rest of my meal was all lumpia.

it’s the closest feeling to what it’s like to have a room full of elders erupt into applause as you dance and twirl like you were six years old, one lumpia in each hand.

For my mother, the seeds have long been planted in her mind that the garden was a sort of shelter, perhaps a way to control and think about something else besides missing her own family.

I think that ghost still travels across the ocean to her granddaughter, and has been for over forty-nine years—this granddaughter who skim-searches the face of every elderly Filipina that she encounters for a sweet and resigned smile just like in her mom’s framed picture.

I haven’t seen her in months, and it turns out I can’t write about gardens and mint without thinking of her embrace. I can smell her hugging me if I close my eyes.

Jackfruit cold, Jackfruit cold and crunch, jackfruit sliced with a knife rubbed down with olive oil so it doesn’t stick on the sweet flesh, jackfruit large and sun-split.

The bark on jackfruit trees produces an orange color used to dye monks’ robes.

The jackfruit rinsed us clean of any worry about how we’d be treated in this country that felt familiar and unfamiliar to me.

Such an auspicious welcome and bit of sweet kindness that didn’t require any translation at all.

Another remembrance of my grandfather reaching out to me, before he ever saw my bespectacled face in person smiling up at him, cheeks full of jackfruit.

O but the taste is one for the poets—not unlike a creamy citrus, think a Creamsicle with a tartness of strawberries newly ripened under late May sunshine.

A mangosteen tastes like Like like like— like a poem with the word ghost in at least four different languages a cage trap of lightning, a sheen of sugar in a bowl like a memory of a plumeria tucked behind your Lola’s ear when you crush a petal of mangosteen in your mouth, the juice runs clear and smells the way certain plants sweeten their nectar at night when they feel the tiptoe-crawl of a bee drawing near. Crisp juice. Maybe more like a honeycreeper buzzing your head during golden hour. It’s a bowl of chipped ice set out on a tray. It’s the wingbeat of a plover on the beach of Hanalei.

So many cultures on this planet believe humans first sprouted from a stalk of sugarcane. Who is to say it isn’t true? Aren’t our hearts our blood our tendons and bones all sisters of sugar, all made of something meant to mumble in a mouth?

And so that is how we ended up with two six-foot-tall stalks balanced between my two boys in our minivan on the hour-long drive home. That is how my dad ended up scrounging around all of the drawers in my kitchen, lamenting that we didn’t have a big bolo knife, like they had in India and the Philippines. No scythe in your home, Aimee! How do you live without one?

I like to think of that first moment of crossing, when the female squeezes into the ostiole, shedding her wings. The wings, almost invisible, are left to scatter at the foot of the tree or nestle inside among the fig flowers. I like to think these wings are still able to flutter and fly and frolic in the form of a parrot or cuckoo or sweets-loving oriole. I don’t worry the crunch; I celebrate the flight.

And the twenty years of friendship and rooting for each other through breakups and marriage and kids and jobs and books. Our immigrant Filipina moms don’t know each other, but I think they would be proud and amazed to know they raised girls who found a way to make a life in books and writing, and that their headstrong oldest girls found each other and are now giggling together over shave ice on an island in the North Pacific.

Even as I write this, I can feel myself smiling, and isn’t that what I tell my students? If you can’t feel it, we can’t feel it: what a gift, what a gift—thank goodness for friends.

Children have few markers of time. My sons never wear watches, and neither have cell phones, but I love that they keep—as my youngest calls it—fruit time. May means strawberries, June is peaches, August equals watermelons, and September is persimmons.

When my sons gather the fruits, they share space with butterflies and birds and wasps in our yard, even a few skinks and anoles. These are also their classmates. They learn from them. And why not?

That night might have been the first time we were feeling one another’s hands, the three of us, I mean, fingers spread wide to fit over my widened belly. I had no idea how much my hands would or could hold. I learned that a mama’s hands could hold much more than she ever dreamed she could want to. It seemed utterly impossible then that in just five more months, our baby would grip my pinky in the center of his whole hand, but it happened, again and again (how I loved it especially when he was soporific from nursing!), and now as I type this, his hands are bigger than mine and they don’t reach for mine as often these days, but some days they do, still, when no one is looking, and I can’t think on it too much or I’d weep. But back then, under thousands of stars—all six of our hands stretched wide and ready to catch a bounty of squeals, cries, and laughter headed toward us in the new year.

Scientists from the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm presented 10 scents to 235 people from 9 different cultures around the world, and selected people from urban areas in the United States and Mexico; hunter-gatherer groups from the Southeast Asian rainforest (such as the Semaq Beri people from the Malay Peninsula in Thailand); fishing communities from Central America’s Pacific coast; as well as secluded farmers living in the South American mountains, as their sample sniffers. All agreed on the scent of fresh vanilla as their favorite.

Never has the world seen so much rumble and sail over such a small berry. Small, dark meteor, perfect pop of fire—you docked millions of boats to the southern coast of India, kept so many folds of pale flesh awake and skittled at night. Dreams of quicker trade routes, maps and battle-plans inked in case anyone tried to stop them from bringing back sackfuls of peppercorn . .

There are not apples enough to cure this country’s sickness. And it is a sickness. A wound on all our soft bellies. Maybe if in the remembering of that terrible tremble of a child, in the rack and ruin of our own broken hearts as we scan the news of yet another mass shooting, perhaps one day we can finally vow to ourselves and to our children that what is more important than holding any weapons of war in your home is the promise of helping one another live another day. To look out for our neighbors (and their children) so that they might have the chance to clamor out of an apple orchard with quickened breath, a bagful of good fruit in each sticky hand.

But no matter if the restaurants serve up their dishes on fine china or wax paper from a food truck, I have yet to find the comfort of those curried spicy potatoes of my childhood. Maybe the next time I will taste them will be on another planet, among glittered dust from another galaxy perhaps, another universe. But if you find the spicy curried potatoes before me, please keep them away from Ursa Major and Minor—the Big and Little Bear—bears love potatoes and have been known to scratch and dig and dig and dig to get to this vegetable most hearty and hale.

but there was so much fruit to be had, and he encouraged me to eat as many as I could while picking, because the next day a thunderstorm was rolling into town and that means the fruits would soon be split, opening their juicy innards up to the birds, bugs, and early rot.

Ninety-nine percent of coconuts used for oil in Thailand have been harvested by monkeys.

But there is a kind and peaceful place in Thailand, founded on the basis of Buddhist teachings, called the Somjai Saekow Monkey Training College, where monkeys are humanely taught how to pick coconuts with no violence or force or shouting. The working monkeys get massages and are even checked for red ants during breaks. The monkey trainers at the school say they understand the worry and fuss from animal rights activists, but their monkeys are taken good care of and treated like pets. In fact, they say working conditions are comparable and many times even better than those of working sheepdogs, oxen, or dogs sniffing for drugs in airports.

What does that do to a person who never sees anyone who looks like them joyfully gathering for a meal in any books, television, or movies? You begin to wonder if it is possible, if it is something you dare hope for in the future.