(by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier)
...the hearty Italian sauce inspired by a rich, slow-cooked French stew called ragoût, derived from ragoûter: “to revive the taste of.” Ragù was popularized by Italy’s 18th-century elite, who’d gone wild for all things French. But what I cooked for my kid, our first summer in New York, was not that.
It was Ragú, with the uphill-not-downhill accent. Cheap American sauce from a jar. This Ragú originated in Rochester and is now owned by a Japanese condiment company. This Ragú never simmered for hours, infusing our home with warmth. East Syracuse was hot enough without any help, and we were between homes. Besides, there was only a microwave. We’d watched the life drain from our stovetop’s one blinking eye the week we arrived at Candlewood Suites.
“What’s that?" my kid asked as I shook pre-shredded cheddar from a plastic package over the watery sauce. I stared around at the frayed furniture. This beleaguered extended-stay hotel, which housed seasonal construction workers and families with credit scores too poor to rent or buy, was affordable, but barely. I couldn’t splurge on food.
“Soup,” I lied.
“No,” Adrian said, glancing toward the open window as a breeze shuffled the heat around. The air conditioner worked, but it also stank. So, mostly, we left it off. “I mean, what’s that sound?”
“Cicadas.”
Adrian nodded. They were only nine, but they had a laptop and the kind of curiosity that attached itself like molting nymphs to trees. I knew they’d research the insects later.
When I was a girl, growing up in northern New England, nobody cooked like my mother. This was figurative, but also literal, as she was the only Chinese-American mom for miles.
“What’s for dinner?” I’d pester the moment she walked in.
If she answered mǎyǐ shàng shù, or “ants climbing up a tree,” I abandoned my Matchbox cars immediately and trailed her into our apartment’s peeling kitchen. I was happy to assist, toyless, if my assistance expedited a meal of noodles with spicy ground beef that clung like ants on branches.
Mǎyǐ shàng shù was my favorite, but all of Mama’s dishes were superb, and she cooked for me and my father every night. Yet this was no traditional marriage: My dad, a towering Texan who’d formerly belonged to the U.S. Air Force intelligence community, now belonged only to me. He no longer worked (and never would again) so I had him all day long, and all evening too, until Mama’s key finally turned the deadbolt.
My homeschooling experience included advanced math, advanced science, advanced English, and tidbits of Arabic, Russian, Japanese, German, Hindustani, Chinese, Pig Latin, and something my dad called Z language. Sometimes, to toy with Mama, we’d speak hybrids: Eenay aohay or Nizi hazao, we’d toss out instead of Nǐ hǎo (“Hello”) as the door swung open. Setting down bags of groceries, she’d frown in silence, her ears untrained to work out these linguistic knots.
There were other knots she couldn’t untie: the Shibari (rope binding) my dad practiced on me with her long, silk scarves. The knots in my stomach when he’d ask me to wash his back in the shower. The emotional interlacement that bound me to him and only him. Regularly, we lied to my mother. He taught me our lies were harmless; a kindness, even. Regularly, we teased her. He taught me joking at her expense was just lighthearted play. It would take years for me to realize I’d been played too; that it was not my dad who belonged to me, now that the Air Force had returned him, but I who belonged to him.
Baffled by our disrespect, our distance, Mama fed us. “Lái, chīfàn,” she’d call out, beckoning with a hand. “Chī, chī, chī,” she’d urge: Eat, eat, eat. Food was something we’d always wanted and needed from her. She was good at food, and she knew it. Our chairs scraped the linoleum floor as we drew up to the table and Mama ladled out hot and sour suān là tang—spooned silky fish over rice.
While we ate, my dad was silent. At times, he was even complimentary. Then the meal was over and he’d pull me away from her again, not bothering to pretend he was a real husband.
This is how we navigated my childhood—my dad, the reckless driver, with me in his passenger seat. My mom a third wheel dragged along until, one day, she detached.
My own kid has no idea how early I learned to cook; that, before age nine, I sliced beef against the grain, chopped broccoli, minced garlic, stir-fried Chinese veggies in pans that seemed as enormous as the full moon. “Mom,” they tease, recalling their own nine-year-old self, “remember your Ragú soup?”
At 12 years old and barely five feet tall, I still wet my pants and, secretly, sucked my thumb. Beyond that, I could no longer wear the clothes my classmates wore or do the things they did. One evening, I stepped on the bathroom scale and read 165.5.
As the slow hours painted our yellow house black, I fumed. I kept thinking about how fat I was, how abnormal. The other girls had moms that let them diet and dads whose eyes didn’t track them everywhere. They had slender hips and sparkly jewelry. Silver hoops and dangling feathers. So, striding into the living room and planting my feet in the brown shag carpet, I told my parents it was time to get my ears pierced.
My mom looked confused, as usual, but my dad shook his head decisively—an odd, lopsided grin shaping his lips—and when I insisted that my body was my body, I didn’t hear myself at first. I didn’t understand why, suddenly, he was yelling at the top of his voice, threatening me with his belt. Or why I was holding my ground.
The standoff escalated until he ordered me, at full volume, to pull my pants and underpants down. But I wasn’t scared of a whupping. Whuppings were nothing. And he wouldn’t dare do anything else; not with Mama in the room. “Lay one more hand on me,” I murmured, “and I’ll call the child abuse hotline so fast your head will spin.”
In an instant he’d risen to his full six-foot-two. And around the time I stated, flatly, that I never slept but he did and I knew where the icepick was, my mom stood up too. “You two figure this out,” she said, walking out of the room. And it was decided. I would no longer eat her food. I would no longer wash his back.
Mama never said another word about the fight. But that summer, she took me to her summer job in Vermont instead of leaving me home with my father. I played with her colleagues’ kids, sat in the classroom where she taught, ate lunch in the cafeteria, and on her day off, she took me to Ames Department Store.
“What are we getting?” I asked.
“You’re getting your ears pierced,” she said. “I am too.”
I still don’t really cook for my family. The art lost its appeal when I was 12 years old. Plus, I married a generous partner who enjoys cooking, and is quite skilled, so when I try to help, he slides a gentle arm around my waist and guides me away from the oven.
Mostly, what I do in the kitchen is grate cheese—the one culinary task my partner allows—or dance.
Our kid is the instigator.
They’re 14, almost 15, now, with legs and arms that like to stay in motion. So, as Adrian does whatever dance is popular, putting a little stank on it, I copy, grater still in hand. Shreds of expensive cheddar spill across the floor.
“The one thing I let you do in here”—my partner snorts—“and you fumble it. Are you trying to attract ants?”
“Dad,” my kid says, bumping their head to the music, “remember the ‘soup’ Mom made the summer we moved here, when you stayed in the Bay Area for work?”
Our kitchen is miles away from the busted electric stovetop at Candlewood Suites East Syracuse, but my nose wrinkles as I smell the Ragú. “How you gonna insult my masterful cooking?” I ask, not for the first time.
“I mean, you poured sauce out of a jar and called it soup. You didn’t even lay hands on a can opener.” For a moment my head buzzes like cicadas, my body warms like an August afternoon. “But it was good,” they tell me. “It was still good.”
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Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is an associate professor of digital storytelling at SUNY Oswego and a writer whose novel is Off the Books. She can be found at https://somafrazier.com.
Ragú
1 jar Ragú sauce, cheapest
Pour sauce in bowl, call “soup,” eat with someone beloved to tide you over between better meals.
Optional: garnish with cheese/onions/goldfish crackers/other.
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