Eliza, from Scratch

by Sophia Lee

bereft.

highlighting the gray hairs at her temple. I used to pluck them out for her, but now they battle the black for majority.

This is the unspoken agreement between us—she speaks to me in her native tongue, I speak to her in mine.

there’s a feeling of suffocation that comes with needing to simplify my thoughts into the limited vocabulary I know,

more importantly, after pregnancy, the mom has just gone through something very difficult and lost lots of her nutrients. Eating miyeokguk on birthdays is not really about whose birthday it is. It actually comes from taking care of the mother.”

But in this life, these recipes are just markings on a page, remnants of a mother-daughter relationship I did not see and a grandmother-granddaughter relationship that did not exist.

ouroboros

Cuckoo rice cooker,

Every year, my birthday arrives in late April, just when the lingering Austin winter finally surrenders to the sudden heat of a Texas spring. Texas weather is unpredictable, but this is a pattern I can expect without fail. I always know my birthday is coming up because the temperature jumps up like it’s trying to celebrate with me.

I wonder what was missing from her generation to mine that I’ve gotten this far without knowing what to do in the kitchen.

It’s humbling to think that they made the most life-altering decision of all time at the age where I can’t even write a personal statement. I get the sense that my parents grew up so much faster than I did.

brusque.

I won’t say aloud, of course, that I’ve never chopped an onion in my life. I also don’t voice that I didn’t know we needed onions to make tomato sauce. The name is tomato sauce, after all, not tomato-and-onion sauce.

Maybe that was part of the problem with Halmeoni and me. There were too many things missed in between the lines, further lost in translation by my bad Korean and her lack of English.

“It’s not the child’s job to take care of her parents. Not yet,” she says.

How many moments over the past few months did I see an opportunity to help care for my mother, and then proceed to ignore it?

No one who’s ever grown up in a non-white household would ever think France has the best cuisine.”

I wish I didn’t sound so much like a teacher’s pet, but I can’t fight against the fabric of who I am.

My mom’s been trying to teach me some of her mother’s old recipes. I think she’s so excited about it because she gets to remember being a kid again,”

chagrin,

It makes me long for a memory that’s not my own.

Suddenly, my memories of my mom alone on our tiled kitchen floor here in Austin feel much colder. Something that used to be a symbol of community turned into solitude. Why did I never join her? Why didn’t my dad?

I can’t count the number of times my mom spread a dab of Fucidin cream over my cut and wrapped it with a SpongeBob or Hello Kitty bandage. I try to imagine my mom being the one with the cut, looking up at Halmeoni with tear-sodden lashes and a chin dimpled with distress. It’s weird to know that my mom was once a child, too.

I realized you can be in a rush to learn everything, get to a new place, and have everybody believe you know nothing. Like only a certain sort of knowledge is valuable.”

She grins. “That’s okay. You’ll remember next time.” She continues to eat, unbothered by my burnt, unsalted eggs. She doesn’t seem to care that the only responsibility I had in cooking this dish, I messed up.

proprioception

I can’t imagine giving part of your culture and childhood to your child and having them come back ashamed, full of rejection, and petulantly annoyed by what you’ve given them.

It’s one thing to know your friends are smart, but it’s another to consider them so competent that it inspires you to be better.

what are the odds that I find friends like y’all again in this lifetime?”

She typically uses the word Americans to mean white people.

The second crack comes with recognizing that my mom never got to do what she loved. She went to college with her dreams and her passions and ended up here, in the States, with neither.

“Mothers and daughters fight all the time! Halmeoni had so much wisdom. Sometimes I was just too young to see it.

I am thinking about how much wisdom Halmeoni could have given me if only I had the language to hear it.

He’s so competent. And I realize, belatedly, horrifically, that I find that competence . . . attractive.

Wesley looks like he’s about to choke. “You—you want me to meet your mother?” A blush creeps up my face. “Well, I . . . for cooking purposes.”

For someone generally smart, I am so outrageously foolish.

“Is he white?” she asks immediately. I don’t know why this is often the first question my parents ask when I mention someone they don’t know.

Of course, there’s always garlic to be minced. I’m convinced my fingers will never not smell like garlic.

entropy.

But maybe the reality is, I use the Korean parts of myself when they’re convenient for me, shrugging them on and off like a jacket.

Being between cultures is like being a bead on a string, trying to balance between two ends.

“Delete that! Curry is not even on the syllabus,” I protest. “This one’s just for me.”

“No one said your problems have to be the worst in the world in order for them to exist.”

Sometimes, it’s like . . . events that happen there are just things that occur in a parallel universe.”

I know how to entertain myself, how to feed myself, how to find new ways to do things. But it’s like that kind of knowledge doesn’t matter to them. There’s no way to prove it.” “‘Like only a certain sort of knowledge is valuable.’”

If cooking with others is an exchange, what I have given Eliza is time and what she has given me is revelation.

I think you are single-handedly changing how I think.

the words on the cusp of trembling like autumn leaves.

I like to shape the letters like I’m gifting them away.

I’m just about to get into my car when I hear footsteps running behind me. When I turn around, Wesley is there.