Had gone to my designer to do a fitting – yes I take my birthday bash seriously and have 3 custom made dresses. Then my girlfriend and I decided to grab something to go as we both had meetings. Instead I found this noodle house on Montgomery, across from the park in Chinatown near Commercial street. It was a hole in a wall kind of place, with an older man with a severe hunchback walking in slow steps serving small bowls of steamy noodles and wonton soup. There was something strangely familiar that drew me in, so I suggested for us to dine in. A bowl of wonton soup cost $4.79. It took five minutes for two bowls to arrive at our table. Staring into this chipped china bowl, it somehow transported me right back to Hong Kong or Guangzhou.
The restaurant was manned by three people: a man behind the counter to cook up noodles and wontons, a woman who was the cashier and the server, who also scooped up soups with a ladle and added beef briskets from a crock pot behind the counter, and then the hunchback elderly whom I saw earlier, who occasionally brought noodle soup bowls out to customers but often disappeared into the back kitchen, presumably to take a nap. There were some counter space for people to sit by, but the restaurant was not busy, so we took a table instead. The portions they served were more in line with what you’d expect in Hong Kong or Guangzhou, as in, it was appropriate and not super-sized like most American Chinese restaurants tend to serve these days. The wontons were crispy skinned and tender inside, with minced shrimp and pork as fillings, the clear broth had been scooped out of a big aluminum pot, which appeared to have been simmering on a stove for hours if not days. The chunks of brisket and tendon were at once tender and chewy, like the ones you’d find at Long Kee Noodle Shop, a place that Anthony Bourdain dined at in Hong Kong, and of course I ate at when I was in Hong Kong in 2010.
I was reminded of those early summer evenings when my mother took me to a nearby wonton shop outside of the school in Changsha, Hu Nan. Along the dirt road were sheds and stalls that served up different kinds of Hunan specialty – rice noodles, wontons, steamed sticky rice buns, often topped with pickled red chilies. My mother taught Chinese literature, and we lived on campus. My father travelled constantly for work, often leaving us a month at a time. He had women throwing themselves at him when he returned, and I supposed often on the road. My last year's therapy work uncovered suppressed memories of father taking me to visit his various women. It would not take a shrink to figure out why then as an adult, I could only be attracted to men who were rarely around and traveled a lot for work, and to this day, I do not have a jealous bone in me. I also felt that men should be free to mate as they please, and I had never based on my decision to stay with a man by how faithful he was in a relationship.
My mother was not a happy woman. She had a thriving career, adored by men, and her students, but she was jealous, suspicious, for good reason, mind you, and she was often very upset, fought with my father and then later on, with those women who hovered. She shed tears, and finally attempted suicide. I observed and watched her suffer silently, I felt at first sorry for her but then I was annoyed. I found her ways of living difficult, incomprehensible, exhausting. I believe people are often disillusioned into believing one's love for another is dependent on promised physical loyalty. If you love someone, you ought to let the person be free and you ought to not have any expectations.
In those years of eating bowls after bowls of wonton soups and staring into a world in a way that only a helpless sad child could, I witnessed girls not much older than I being raped and molested by neighbors, teachers and strangers. I was a subject of an attempted rape once. I fought him off - he was the husband of a woman who was and still is my mother's friend - for that, I couldn't forgive my mother. I didn't recall how the subject of being forced down and having an grown man on top of me came up, I was barely 8, but I suspected no one believed me. I was then subsequently molested by another person repeatedly, by then I was 10 and no one seemed to care. I was horribly beaten by drunk or angry father, yelled at constantly by my unhappy mother, and I anticipated when that hand might come striking down on my face, for no apparent reason. Around autumn, on the heel of me turning 12, I found myself abandoned in a military hospital by my parents, suffering from an actual heartbreak. There, injured soldiers befriended me and we'd run into the woods and pick fallen chestnuts. When I was merely 13, my mother entrusted me to a male summer camp counselor, you know how that story would lead and end. Yet, throughout, miraculously, my grades never suffered. I was always at the top of my class and won academic competitions at a city of ten plus million people. My therapist said that I suffered from multitude of PDSD, and had I been born into U.S., 9 out of 10 I'd have become a crack addict. Yet, somehow, my soul never got crushed. I was still whole.
If you ask me today whether I’d wish for my life to change, I’d tell you no. I am who I am today because of my experiences. However hideous my past was, it made me whom I am today.
Plus, I always had fond memories of being very young, and in a stall, sitting on a little wooden chair, slurping up warm wonton soup. Steam rose covering my face, and there, one could cry and everyone would think you simply had taken one too many bites of chili peppers.
My shrink thinks that I should be more assertive when it comes to emotions. I shrugged when I heard her saying that. I’m not a demanding person. I will be the first to admit that I have intimacy issues. Which is why I had only one real boyfriend in the past, we dated on and off until I was married. I considered him my only boyfriend because he was the only person I loved unconditionally and he was the only person who adored and loved me affectionately. Of course he was never really around, he went to grad school in Boston and took a job in Wall Street. It was a long distance relationship at best; more like an illusion of a make-believe relationship. We barely talked on the phone, we wrote emails to each other sporadically. I went to visit him in Cambridge, he came to visit me in San Francisco. We never said "I love you" to each other. But in the end, when I decided to leave for good, to be married, he felt frantic and upset. He thought that I deserted him.
He told me that I broke his heart and it would never recover, he claimed. I couldn't tell if he broke mine or not.
I knew going in, I loved him the only way I knew how. Non-demanding, generous, unconditional, and never ever broke a promise. I knew he saw other women - it did not bother me. I knew he had trouble keeping promises - trips he failed to show, calls he failed to make, and emails he failed to write. I never gave up. I knew he had trouble committing; it did not bother me either. I believed in him. He was the light at the end of the tunnel.
Then, just like that, the light went out.
But that was before I was an adult. Before I grew up. You don’t become an adult until you pass 35.
I have children of my own now. They hug me and tell me that they love me. My children would have different lives than mine, thankfully.
What if the world is uncertain, and the only thing that one finds comfort in, is that bowl of wonton soup, served steamy hot, with beef briskets and a ladle of clear broth?
But suppose, let’s just suppose, for once, what if the old wonton shop had long been torn down in a city full of ghosts that you vowed to never return, and what if you found another restaurant, on the opposite end of the world, and just like that, you were given another chance to life, to feel alive, what then?
Winter is coming, darling. I would like to spend the last season, sharing the last bowl of wonton soup with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment