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My mother was cooking when we heard about the cheese.
SHPLAAAAAAAHCRSHHH!!!
The splash and roar of boiling oil meeting fresh snow peas leaves drowned out the AM station, and then:
"Government cheese can be picked up downtown at the corner of l9th and William J Bryan."
"Cheese?" said my father, "Hey! Wifey! When's dinner ready?"
SHPLAAAHCRSHH!!
"Soon!" barked my mother, "Don't go anywhere!" She stirred the snow peas leaves around in the blistering garlic sweat. "Soon! Don't go anywhere!"
"Back in fifteen minutes! C'mon, Sonny!"
Cruising down Texas Avenue, Pops kept snapping his fingers in delight. "During war, there was never enough food. Plenty of other things. Like diseases and bombs and those other lovely things. But I was your age at the time, maybe a little younger, and I always wonder, when will we have the big feasts that everyone talk about? Not even New Year's Eve do we have the feasts... "
When we got to the old Social Security building, my father rushed in like he was rescuing babies. He walked out with one small block of cheese wrapped in plastic. "We don't need much," he said.
I didn't say a word.
When we got back home, my mother was sitting like an empress, isolated and alone, behind a table overrun with platters of food - the garlicky snowpeas leaves, the juicy cabbage and mushrooms, the sweet pork ribs, the colorful beef and broccoli, and the murky dates and peanuts soup. I could hear the dishes, all together now, singing out like a band of schoolchildren just released from class. But then I looked again at my mother sitting alone with a full table and four empty chairs and four empty rice bowls. I thought perhaps she was a ghost, until she spoke.
"What is that?" she said.
"Cheese," said Pops.
"Cheese?"
"We might need it sometime."
"We don't need cheese! Look at all the food we have. All this food, chopped and cooked and waiting to be eaten! No woman in the world cooks like this and then has to wait for her husband and son and daughter to sit and eat it! And then her husband brings cheese!?"
My sister ran into the dining room and sat down next to my mother, lifting a sore from my eyes. My father and I sat down too.
Pops tossed the cheese onto the kitchen counter. "I just wanted to make sure- - "
"We're not refugees any more! We're not even graduate students! You're a professor at a major university in the United States! We don't need free cheese! We don't need anything free! In fact, I want to pay full price on every bag of rice, every head of cabbage, every everything! And if we ever need free cheese, I'll be the first in line, short and skinny me, pushing away the whole world, saying, 'Free cheese! Free cheese! If you don't give me cheese, I kill every one in this joint!"'
Pops put his hand on Mom's shoulder, and she began breathing again. Then he scratched his nose, stretched his neck, and pointed his chopsticks at me and my sister. "When the Japanese surrounded our town in Hunan, we escaped before they could come in and destroy everything they didn't want to rape. So we ran away from there, our family minus my father who was fighting in the front. We ran. We left everything behind and ran. And we would stop only long enough to hear the crack crack crack of the guns. And we'd know then that the bayonets weren't far behind.
"One time, some of us kids got so tired of running, my mother told us we were going to die if we didn't run faster. We all started crying, except for me because I was oldest. So my mother paid a big man some money and some salted preserved eggs to carry us, two at a time, in baskets, one basket on each end of a pole, the pole put across his shoulders. And we took turns sitting in those baskets, except for me because I was the oldest. Even so, we were very lucky for that luxury. But then, the next time we ate, there was nothing but plain rice gruel - the eggs that would have given it flavor were in that big man's stomach. When I looked at that plain rice, I almost turned my bowl over.
"Then, after running and stopping and stopping and running - - finally, we were in a very tiny village, a very poor village, we weren't even in the village, we were in a cave next to the village. But we heard a crack crack crack. And I knew we had to run again. But my mother didn't say anything. She walked quietly toward the village. We walked behind her with light feet because the cracking was coming from within the village. We got to the village, and everyone was laughing in the streets, lighting firecrackers, crack crack crack. And it wasn't even New Year's Eve. An old woman pulled my mother aside and whispered in her ear, 'Rumor has it, the Japanese surrendered! Some sort of a big bomb killed them all! Sounds too easy after all these years of war, but we'll celebrate just in case it's true.'
"It was true. And the villagers killed some chickens and picked a bunch of vegetables and fruits and that night we had a big happy feast."
My father looked down into his rice bowl to discover that it had been filled. He dug his chopsticks into the hot sticky rice. The rest of us also brought the rice steam to our faces. We ate.
After we ate, we burped. And after we burped, my mother said to me, "Why don't you go ahead and finish up these three dishes, so we don't have to save them."
"There's no room in my stomach," I said.
"There's no room in the refrigerator," said my mother.
"But I'm not a garbage disposal."
"If you were, we wouldn't give you any food because we don't throw away food. But you're not. You're our son. And when we make you eat the leftovers, it's an investment."
I looked up from my bowl.
"An investment in your health, your future, and your education," said my mother.
I burped again. And I ate again.
SKRRP! SKRRP! SKRRP!
And my mother scraped again. She scraped the leftover food and sauce and even the rice into several bowls. She then stuffed these bowls into a refrigerator pregnant and overdue with a dozen or so other bowls of leftovers. Later, these foods would be scraped from the bowls back into the woks and pots and from there scraped into the platters and from there into the mouths.
From my room that night, I heard something slam against the dining room wall. Something else thrown to the floor. A door slammed. Twice. Thrice.
My father called me out. The cheese was on the floor, its plastic wrap having been ripped by angry fingernails. Next to the cheese, under the dinner table, was a puddle of warm tea. And sprinkled along the wall were assorted chocolate- covered nuts.
"We had another food fight," said my father, "Your mother's right about the cheese. Sometimes, I think today is yesterday." My father began picking up pieces of chocolate from the floor and popping them into his mouth. He looked in my eyes as I looked in his mouth. It was stuffed full of chocolate as he gurgled, "Never waste food."
I picked up a chocolate- covered macadamia, and I popped it in my mouth.
"A little dust and dirt builds resistance. Resistance is good," said my father, popping and not stopping.
"If you throw something, you have to pick it up," he said, "If you throw food, you eat it."
I picked up a chocolate from the corner. It was covered with spider webs. "I'm not eating- - "
My father grabbed the chocolate from me and immediately squeezed and peeled the chocolate off. There was a filbert in his open palm. He popped it in his mouth. "There is something good in every piece of food. Corollary: Everything and every one is food to somebody or something, so- o- o... "
Later that night I awoke with a dry throat. I went for water. My mother was sitting at the dining table. Mother was with cheese.
"I don't make anything with cheese," she said, staring vacantly into the back yard. She looked down at the cheese. "Some people have difficulty remembering, some have difficulty forgetting."
"I'll eat the cheese," I said.
"No," she said, "I can make something new, with cheese."
"I'll eat it," I said.
"Don't be a martyr. You're too young to be a martyr."
"I don't mind eating cheese. I'll put it on something else. It won't even taste like cheese."
My mother looked at me, and looked at me again. "One of my uncles died because of cheese."
I looked down at the table, as if it were my fault.
My mother squeezed the cheese. "I brought cheese home to my parents one time. The war was long over, and we were in Taiwan, and I saw some cheese in the marketplace. I recognized it immediately. It was the strange- smelling food that Westerners ate with their bread. We weren't poor anymore, so I bought some. When I took it home, my father slapped it out of my hands. He said, 'Do you remember your uncle Shu Hong?'
"I remembered him, he was a close family friend. My father picked up the cheese from the floor and said, 'When I was in the Japanese prison camp, there was a Japanese officer, a medium rank officer who was in charge of the camp. He used to eat lunch everyday, in the middle of the prison, right in front of us. All of us prisoners were starving, and he would come out every day with fish, rice, bread, and some of this!' My father waved the cheese in my face and went on, 'And so one day, this officer said to Shu Hong, "You look so skinny! Like you haven't eaten for many weeks!" Shu Hong ignored him and went on working. But the officer wouldn't let him go. The officer said, "You want some of this?" And he lifted the cheese from his plate. Shu Hong didn't say anything. So the officer tells his underling something in Japanese, and the underling rushes away. When the underling comes back, he has a big block of something wrapped in greasy brown paper. The underling hands it to Shu Hong, and Shu Hong unwraps it. It was a big block of cheese, but covered with a thick coat of blue mold and white fuzz. And there were little black bugs gnawing at it. Shu Hong said, "Damn you!" and slammed the cheese on the officer's table, and his fish flew threw the air like it had wings, and his rice bowl twirled down to the ground. Shu Hong grabbed that officer by the neck and began choking him. The officer coughed up a glob of cheese and bread and then grabbed his revolver and shot Shu Hong two times through the heart.' And then my father put the cheese back in my hands, and I returned it to the market."
"We can't return the cheese," I said.
"It's just a story. Me and your father weren't fighting over the cheese."
"What were you fighting over then?" "All food." The next day, I saw the cheese in the refrigerator, but I didn't bother to eat it. I forgot about it. Two weeks later, it was blue with mold. I cut the mold off and ate its heart. It was good. There were no leftovers.
