Arsenic and Adobo (Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery, #1)

by Mia P. Manansala

Besides, I hate seeing someone unsatisfied with their food. It means they’re going unnurtured. Unfed.”

In typical Filipino fashion, my aunt expressed her love not through words of encouragement or affectionate embraces, but through food. Food was how she communicated. Food was how she found her place in the world. When someone rejected her food, they were really rejecting her heart. It crushed her.

At his blank look, I added, “We don’t really use chopsticks in the Philippines. We mostly use a spoon and fork or our hands.” “Why?” I shrugged. I served food, not history lessons. If he really wanted to know, he could google it.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been stared down by an elderly Asian woman, but It. Is. Terrifying. Don’t be fooled by the cute florals and jaunty visors—these women will end you, wielding nothing but their sharp tongues, bony elbows, and collapsible shopping carts.

Even someone like me felt utang na loob, that impossible to quantify sense of indebtedness and gratitude, to the people who’d raised me. But where was that magical line between selfishness and independence? Between my family and myself?

But her refusal to try anything new and insistence on me being a “real” Filipino grated on me. As a second-generation member of a colonized country, born and raised in the Midwestern United States, what did that even mean?

I made it to Adeena’s fifteen minutes late, which in Brown People Time (BPT) meant I was actually a little early.

I almost said “just friends,” as if romantic partnership was superior to platonic friendship, but stopped myself. Adeena hated that term and idea. And I’d learned, time and again, she was right. There was no hierarchy to love.