The first victim fell ill at a Thai restaurant in Taipei, where he had reportedly eaten a set meal of papaya salad and drunken noodles. Within two hours of the meal, he experienced mild nausea, then fatigue, and then another twenty hours later he was dead. He was a healthy man in his thirties who had recently run a half-marathon, a fact the news broadcasts repeated over and over, airing the same two photos of the man posing with his race medal and dying in the hospital bed side by side. His face was blurred out in both images, lending the collage a kind of threatening vagueness that seemed to say: it could be you, it could be anyone. He was surnamed Zheng, they said. He lived alone and had three cats.
Four more emerged in the following days, all of whom had dined at the restaurant on the same day as Mr. Zheng. Each case followed the same pattern: abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea, then rapid organ failure. It wasn’t E. coli, or salmonella, or even botulism. None of the usual food poisoning culprits turned up in the bodies of the victims. For days the laboratories tested every ingredient and every contact surface in the restaurant’s kitchen for what could be causing the mysterious illness, to no avail, as diners succumbed to renal and liver failure, falling into comas one by one.
Initially, ugly murmurs echoed across the internet, people jumping to point fingers at the Southeast Asian migrant community for so-called unclean food practices. The headlines were blunt and alarmist, emphasizing the ethnicity of the chefs and waitstaff. It’s no surprise, Taiwanese locals said amongst themselves, everyone knows their food was dirty to begin with —never mind that it was an upscale restaurant in the lush alleys of Da’an district, frequently patronized by white expats who made six times the average local salary, or that the owner of the restaurant was actually Japanese. But then a new crop of cases emerged, this time from a Taiwanese banquet-style restaurant, where people gathered with their families or coworkers in large groups, or sometimes held weddings. A popular night market was next, specifically one much-beloved stall selling charcoal-roasted pork buns, where at any given time there was a queue snaking down the block. The victims were Taiwanese, German, American, exchange students and white-collar workers and tourists. That put an abrupt end to the accusatory whispers. Online comments laced with overt racism were soon replaced by real panic, as people began to suspect every source of food around them. Anything edible could be tinged with the fatal bacteria, if it was even a bacteria, which no one could confirm.
And in Taiwan, the culture of food was inescapable. There were more restaurants and food institutions per capita in Taipei than in virtually every other metropolitan city in Asia. Many apartments in the city lacked kitchens, including my own; most people I knew who had grown up in Taiwan could not have boiled an egg if held at gunpoint. Everyone worked long hours, after all, and few would choose to go home and cook a balanced meal when there were mom-and-pop shops everywhere, and convenience stores overrun with options for every conceivable food group. But now the entire food chain was potentially tainted. Restaurants began shuttering one by one. Potential danger seeped into the air like spores of mold.
Personally, it was terribly inconvenient timing. My mother was due to arrive in Taipei the following week. It was summer, and being outdoors felt like death by asphyxiation, the heat choking back words as they tried to leave your throat. It was miserably hot, barely habitable in fact, and there was nothing to do besides sit in different air-conditioned rooms to consume various beverages or food. My mother, from the last I remembered, ate as little as she could to survive—but I knew she still wanted to visit night markets and restaurants in her short time here, to experience the culinary landscape of a place she had never been. If the dining options I’d planned to show her all shut down, I had no idea what I would do with her. I felt on edge all week, as if I was walking into an exam I hadn’t prepared for.
* * *
I had moved to Taipei four years earlier, initially for a teaching position meant to last a year. By the end of it I had fallen in love with a chef at a local bistro who made incredible pasta and talked openly about the breast sizes of the women he had slept with before me. At times he would grab a handful of my belly or my ass and say: this is how everyone knows you’re American. He had beautiful hands and a way of looking at me that made me immediately forget the content of everything he had been saying, so all that was left was the melodious tones of a language still new to me. Probably what kept me attached was my failure to understand what he was saying most of the time. That, and his cooking.
Tragically, I had moved to one of the only places in the world with a standard of thinness similar to my mother’s. I grew accustomed to the rapid assessments of strangers, who did in fact tell me often that they could tell I was American by the way I carried myself, which I took to mean the way certain parts of my body stuck out more than that of the average Taiwanese woman. My posture worsened, I discovered upon seeing photos of myself, my neck always hunched over slightly, pulled down by the self-consciousness I dragged around with me like an extra limb.
Still, I liked Taipei enough to stay. There was something liberating about slipping under a sea of racial homogeneity, where I was just one anonymous body in a crowd of anonymous bodies. By the time my relationship with the chef ended, I had a new job, a studio apartment all to myself, and a much wider vocabulary for conducting arguments in Mandarin. I had neither the money nor desire to visit my parents back in Illinois, so I hadn’t seen them since I’d moved. I felt guilt about this on occasion, like when they sad-reacted to the clipped messages I remembered to send on holidays and birthdays, but it wasn’t enough to make me do anything differently. Being away from my old life and all its trappings helped me prune my existence into a shape of my own. Once I had control over my own life, I never wanted to let it go.
* * *
The day my mother arrived, I surprised us both by picking her up from the airport. I had never done that before for anyone, yet somehow, I found myself that morning on the subway, feet moving robotically as if I myself were attached to an airport conveyor belt. I suppose the faint aura of crisis that had drifted into the horizon since the illness had emerged was what compelled me to do it, some degree of worry rising out of me in wisps, although I wasn’t sure if I was more concerned for her safety or for the inevitable judgments she would pass once she saw what my life here was like. Perhaps being there to intercept her would lend me more control over what she thought. I knew every minute would feel like I had something to prove.
Long before the poisoning incidents broke out, travelers to Taiwan were strictly forbidden from bringing pork products through customs. At the airport there were signs everywhere depicting decapitated cartoon pigs with large red Xs drawn over them, as if to scare you into being a vegetarian. The fine for being caught with pork in any form—which included, for example, a sushi roll containing a single teaspoon of pork floss you had hypothetically bought from your origin airport and forgot to consume on your flight—was up to one million Taiwan dollars. Now, after the outbreak, people traveling to Taiwan were no longer allowed to bring anything consumable at all.
It was an alarming feeling to show up at the airport without any luggage. Surrounded by travelers power walking through security lines, I kept feeling like I had forgotten all my things. Everyone at the airport was wearing masks again, as if a foodborne bacteria could crawl into one’s orifices just from breathing too close to an infected noodle. A group of officers wearing hazmat suits pulled a jar of Marmite out of a sweaty Australian man’s bag. People didn’t try to avert their stares as he was led into a grim interrogation room.
After making my way to arrivals, I stood awkwardly next to all the people holding up signs with names printed in bold letters, waiting to greet the people they loved. I crossed my conspicuously empty arms and shifted my weight back and forth on my feet. Surrounded by people visibly wearing their emotion, it actually felt inappropriate for me to be there, as if I’d taken a wrong turn and ended up at a stranger’s wedding.
People started trickling out of the exit. When my mother came out and saw me, she smiled, then frowned. I felt her eyes roaming over my body and stiffened, hoisting her bag over my shoulder to hide myself from her gaze.
What are you doing here? she said by way of greeting. I had almost forgotten what her voice sounded like. You came all the way out here just to show me how to get to your apartment? I know how to use Google Maps. Don’t you have better things to do?
* * *
My mother was coming to Taipei not exactly to see me, but rather to use me as a convenient 24-hour layover on her long journey from suburban Illinois to her hometown of Tianjin in China. Her sister was very ill with stomach cancer, which the doctors had only discovered a couple of months before, at which point it had already spread to her liver and lungs. The prognosis was not good. She had remained single her whole life and had no children, so the last person left to take care of her in her final months was my mother. I knew that a substantial part of her didn’t want to come at all, to punish her sister for refusing to adhere to societal norms of womanhood and actualize the old threat Chinese women repeated constantly to themselves and their daughters—if you don’t have children, who will take care of you when you’re old, you’ll die alone. If there is one thing my mother excels at, even in the face of her only sister’s impending mortality, it is the smug finality of I told you so.
Still, even though my mother had done what she was instructed and had a child, that child had not made any perceptible effort to see her or speak to her since her sixty-fifth birthday. I wondered if the irony of the situation was lost on her: she who had dutifully done the work of raising a kid but reaped none of the rewards promised by the framework of filial piety, now going to great lengths to act as caretaker for her childless sister, who was supposed to be dying alone.
I didn’t want her to acknowledge the strangeness of my going to pick her up from the airport when I hadn’t so much as responded to her texts in so many months, because saying it out loud would mean speaking into existence the tensions between us, which had until now existed merely as a vapor that curled around our fingertips. I was fine with things staying that way. I didn’t want to kick over the elephant-sized rock to reveal the crawling facts living on its damp underside, such as the fact of my being a cruel and unfilial daughter, because that would then mean having to litigate all the reasons for my being a cruel and unfilial daughter. So when she expressed shock that I was there, I acted like it was a perfectly normal thing for me to be doing. I picked up her bag and headed for the exit, waiting for her to follow.
* * *
Our first stop was back to my apartment to drop off her suitcase. I lived just upstairs from a butcher shop, where every day fresh pig carcasses were strung up with twine, partitioned and lined up neatly by body part. It was satisfying to look at, like the inside of a bento box. Usually there were dozens of aunties crowded around the store, clamoring for the butcher’s attention in loud tones of dialect, but ever since the outbreak people had been avoiding wet markets.
Now the shop stood empty. But, for some reason, the production of pork had not yet stopped—pigs were still being slaughtered, I supposed, for meat nobody wanted. My mother gawked at it as we passed by, pausing at the section containing their heads. It had discomfited me when I first moved in to walk by the row of pig’s faces hanging overhead, their eye sockets empty and snouts still intact, and I watched as my mother’s head swiveled to stare at them as we passed.
That doesn’t bother you? she asked me.
Not anymore, I said. Part of me was enjoying this role reversal—my mother, wearing her Sketchers sneakers and North Face windbreaker, looked so vividly American against the backdrop of my neighborhood, where one could see from the peeling paint and faded tiling the sharp traces of how these spaces were passed from generation to generation, so unlike suburban Chicago, where rapid development had flooded neighborhoods with cookie-cutter drywall and saplings so young and frail they reminded one of just-born deer. Now I fit in here, and she didn’t. I felt something almost resembling pride.
That was dashed, of course, as soon as I glanced at the expression on her face. She didn’t bother to conceal her plain disgust.
You left America? For this? she said in disbelief, as we navigated around potholes on the sidewalk.
The side of my neck was cramping from carrying her bag on my shoulder. I massaged it, exhaling hard, using the sweat on my skin as a lubricant.
The buildings are all old, she said. Everything is falling apart. Wow, that one looks like a dumpster. People live there, seriously?
An elderly man walking beside us glowered at her. The way she spoke Mandarin was louder and brasher than the standard here, the hard Rs of her mainland Chinese accent ringing like a bell in the street.
I know you don’t want to be here, but can you at least try not to talk so loudly? I said. You know everyone here can understand you. People are staring.
Who said I don’t want to be here? she said.
My parents had achieved the American Dream at a relatively young age, having moved to the United States for graduate school when they were twenty-two. I wondered, growing up, if they were lonely or homesick or flagged by any of the other descriptors one might expect an immigrant to carry like a loose cape, but for as long as I could remember they’d expressed only enthusiasm for America. They adored Wheel of Fortune and sprawling malls and the idea of the “happy hour.” When I told them about my decision to move, the horrified silence over the line was so total that I thought the call had dropped. You’re thirty years old and you’ve decided to be an English teacher in Asia, they said finally, with withering disdain. They probably would have reacted better if I’d told them I’d gotten arrested.
It’s possible that I’d only wanted to move to Asia in the first place because I couldn’t understand how wholly American they were, and the lack of backstory behind my exterior appearance made me feel disembodied at times, as if I were a video game character to whom my player had given Asian-looking features just for fun.
We entered my apartment and set her things down, and finally her gaze landed on me properly. I felt her eyes dissecting me from head to toe, almost hungrily, seeking out signs of weakness. Instinctively, I stood up straighter, pulling my shoulders back so my collarbones would show.
You’ve gained weight, she announced, as I knew she would.
Of course, I said dryly. You can always count on me for that.
She, on the other hand, looked more birdlike than I had ever remembered. It was the longest I had gone without seeing her since I moved out at eighteen, and now that she had crossed the border into senior citizenry, every sharp edge previously considered beautiful was exaggerated by the years that had elapsed over the course of her lifetime. Her gray hairs were now white, her thin face sunken, the lines around her mouth etched in permanently by the absence of any fat padding her skin. I wondered how long it had been since she’d eaten a carbohydrate. Her wrist was so slender it actually looked hollow, like a reed.
Well, how much? she asked, unable to help herself. How much do you weigh now?
I stared at her, saying nothing, until the space between us felt waterlogged. I sensed a bare edge of embarrassment in her gaze. Finally she looked away.
* * *
I had always been a chubby child growing up, to the delight and chagrin of my parents’ friends, who could use me as relieved yardstick against their daughters—at least there was always someone bigger than their own. Wow! they would always exclaim upon seeing me. So strong and healthy!
No, she’s obese, my parents would say.
It’s good to raise someone who’s not a picky eater, you don’t waste so much, they would always reply, as if my mouth was a garbage chute ready to receive unwanted food at any moment.
Though my parents were deeply Americanized, their foreignness was apparent in ways that included none of the good, such as passing down a language or culinary practice, and only the bad, such as draconian metrics for measuring success and beauty. I had always been aware of my size, and that it was something to be ashamed of, but the distance between my body and a body that would have been deemed acceptable by Chinese standards didn’t sink in for me until I got old enough to start caring about clothes.
The first time I went shopping for my own pair of jeans, I was just starting middle school. My mom took me to the mall and led me into stores full of the kinds of shoppers I feared, where huge, blown-up posters of angular white people wearing almost nothing stared down menacingly from the walls. She pulled every size of jeans that could have conceivably fit me off the racks, and in the dressing room, I twisted and mangled my legs in a valiant attempt to squeeze into each pair, to no avail. I could not even fit into the largest sizes. I emerged with my head held low, trying not to look at her or anyone else, wanting very badly to be released. Each successive store was the same: she would hand me armfuls of denim, and I would disappear into the dressing room, alone with the treacherous pants, none of which I could button or even squeeze over my eleven-year-old thighs. I imagined the skin and flesh of my legs as layers of an onion. I fantasized about peeling them off layer by layer and throwing them into the trash.
In retrospect, I suspect my mother did this to me intentionally. She gave me the pants knowing none of them would fit me. She wanted me to feel the hot clasp of shame, she hoped that in that environment, surrounded by girls who were svelte and graceful, like tiny gazelles, I would look myself in the eye and vow to change.
* * *
What are we going to eat? she asked me. Is it safe to eat anything?
She looked behind me at the space where there would have been a kitchen if I had one. Instead there was a tiny countertop with a half-eaten bag of potato chips flavored to taste like fried chicken, and two cans of beer. On days I didn’t feel like going out to find a real meal, which happened often in the summertime, I would sit on the ground of my apartment in my underwear and mechanically eat from a bag of chips until my stomach hurt, as if I was a subway rat. There was something pleasurable about gorging myself on food so heavily processed it was hardly recognizable as food. When the food poisoning cases broke out, I felt vindicated, like I had actually protected myself by giving into the safety of chemicals processed in a laboratory.
I think we’ll have to eat out, I told her. It’s not like we can starve.
As if she hasn’t already been doing that for the past thirty years, I thought to myself. She frowned and said nothing.
I could see that her curiosity about the cuisine here was at war with herself. If it wasn’t for the new laws against importing food, she would have brought protein bars to tide herself over for these two days, but now there was no way around it.
There have only been a few dozen cases so far, I said. Two million people live in Taipei and most of them eat out multiple times a day. The odds are pretty low.
Fine, she said. Let’s see what all the fuss is about Taiwanese food anyway.
I took her to a small neighborhood spot that sold traditional breakfast food: hot soymilk, salty dough fritters, rolled egg pancakes. It was cheap, greasy food served under fluorescent lights, with oil stains dotting walls that looked like they had only ever been cleaned as an afterthought. An old-school antenna TV was affixed to a corner of the ceiling, airing the local news.
I watched her face closely as she dipped the fried dough in the soymilk and took a bite. When she looked disappointed, my heart sank a little in parallel. This is it? she said. It tastes the same as what you get frozen from the grocery store.
It’s not that complex of a food, I said. What were you expecting?
I thought Taiwanese breakfast was supposed to be famous, she said.
I took a bite. She was right: the dough fritter tasted stale, like it had been sitting out for a day. I thought of the heat outside and what might happen to food exposed to it for more than a few minutes, shuddering internally. Mmm, I said with relish, not willing to admit defeat.
The news anchor interrupted us with the latest update on the outbreak. All the ambient conversation in the air dissolved. Another fifteen people had fallen ill since yesterday, she said. Nine more had died. For the first time, the new cases detected in a single day couldn’t be traced back to just one location, which meant that the illness was beginning to spread faster. It was encroaching.
The owner of the restaurant hastily shut the TV off. The ensuing silence was far louder, as we all tried to pretend we hadn’t been clinging to every word of the broadcast. There was no air-conditioning in this restaurant, only a fan whirring overhead, and the sound of the fan expanded into the small space, filling every corner of the room. I felt sweat dripping down my temple. A fruit fly zoomed around my cup of soymilk in figure eights. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a young couple quickly stand up to leave, their food barely touched, steam still rising from the plates.
You left America? my mother said to me again, a quiet hiss. For this?
* * *
Not everyone who fell ill died, at least not immediately, although a shockingly high proportion of them did. Twenty-four out of the 113 cases detected thus far were still living, and they appeared on news broadcasts day after day, their faces gaunt, looking almost translucent.
It’s awful, really awful, one man said. I can’t keep anything down. Every time I think it’s over, I keep expelling more.
I really thought I would die, a woman said. I didn’t know you could survive from something like that.
The symptoms were always the same at first, identical to any other foodborne illness: nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. It drained the color from their lips, their cheeks, it crept along their veins deeper and deeper into the body. Then, if they were unlucky, it would wrap around the tender motor of their heart and abruptly cut off the blood supply from their organs. They would fall comatose and die, usually within a couple of days.
Many of the survivors on TV looked like they were barely clinging to life. Their visible malnourishment pockmarked the inside of my brain. It was difficult to look away. The little calculators inside my head whirred away with the dull regularity of a white noise machine. I was powerless to stop it. I could probably encircle her entire upper arm with my thumb and middle finger, I thought. Her entire waist could probably fit into my pant leg.
During the worst bout of food poisoning I ever had, I lost enough weight to fit into an aspirational dress my mother had bought for me when I was still a teenager. I was never even close to the right size to wear it, and she dangled it in front of me cruelly, a carrot stick to a donkey. I was in college then and still carried that dress around with me like a cursed rabbit’s foot, deciding to hold onto it over and over again at the end of every year as I moved from dorm to dorm. Its evil light gripped me through the years. I was in its power.
When the food poisoning struck me, I spent two weeks throwing up, shitting my guts out, weak with fever and dehydration. Yet every morning my routine was still the same: I would drag myself to the bathroom, remove all my clothes, and step on the scale. At some point I realized that it was a number I had not seen since I was many years younger. And then I remembered the dress. I dug it up from my closet and sucked in. The zipper zipped. I was dizzy with disbelief. It felt as if my body was no longer mine, it no longer belonged to me, it was freed.
I gained it all back, of course, after the virus left me. After that, every time I got sick, a small and treacherous thrill lit up inside me. The vicious thing about illness for people like me: it invites you into the heady illusion of another kind of life, and then, just as rapidly, it yanks it away. With a jolt of whiplash you return to who you always were.
* * *
On my phone, I got a notification from the local news channel: authorities had found the cause at last. A particular compound in the rice at that first Thai restaurant, left in specific and unyielding conditions, had fermented, incubating a lethal bacteria. Once it lodged into the bodies of the first victims, it had begun to spread through the various bodily fluids they’d expelled over the course of their illness. It could stay alive in the sewage systems, in the city’s water supply, looping all the way back to the manufacturing of other consumable products. In the article, they called it rice poison.
We had left the breakfast shop and were sitting down at a teahouse now, drinking hojicha and nibbling on peanut brittle. It looked like everyone got the notification, or some variant of it, at the same time. Don’t worry! the owner of the teahouse said cheerily to the room. We use ultra filtered water from mountain springs! Very safe! A nervous-looking woman sitting beside us reached over to pour herself a glass of the reportedly safe water, knocking over a cup of tea. The boss rushed over to clean it up.
My mother seemed unbothered. She took another sip with great satisfaction. She loved tea, parroting articles that claimed caffeine would boost your metabolic rate, and she could name the health benefits and antioxidant value of each tea variety. Our cabinet was full of green tea weight loss supplements that she took religiously. I tried one once, and it made my heart beat like a rabbit’s.
Once, when I was in elementary school, I went into the kitchen late at night to get a glass of water. I saw her then, standing at the stove, looking motionlessly at the pot of cabbage soup she was preparing for the next day, or maybe staring at the wall behind it. She hadn’t eaten dinner with us in a week, instead replacing each meal with a soup of boiled cabbage that she prepared in batches and microwaved one bowl at a time. A wooden spoon dangled from her hand. She looked so tiny there, not moving even as the pot began to hiss. A small seed of grief bloomed inside me, although I couldn’t name it then, slowly unfurling its petals. I watched her from the darkness of the hallway for a minute until the soup boiled over, and then, without making a sound, I went back to my room and shut the door.
* * *
I had grown into existence inside her, like a parasite. I emerged from her body. Her body beget mine, she created me, she owned me. I grew and I grew into a meaty, alien thing. For years she must have watched in simple horror.
Everything that came later, everything she did to me, was only her way of trying to help me, I tried to tell myself. She was not equipped to speak to me in anything other than the language of shame.
* * *
We left the teahouse to go for a walk in Da’an Park. The sky was overcast, humidity hanging in the air like a wet blanket. It felt somehow wholesome to be sweating so much, as if my insides were being washed. My mother complained that it was too hot and found a bench for us to sit.
On the path in front of us, a jogger paused to drink from his bottle. His face looked grey in the dimming light. And then I heard it: loud retching, impossibly violent. He was bent over in two like a hairpin, then fell down to his hands and knees, vomiting uncontrollably on the road.
Everyone around us scattered in an audible panic. A short distance away, people started taking out their phones to film. I realized we were the last people within a twenty-foot radius of him. I stood to leave, but my mother stayed seated.
What are you doing? I said. We should go.
She was frozen on the bench, staring vacantly at him. An unidentifiable mixture of emotions passed across her face.
We need to leave, I said. You do what you want, but I’m going.
How can you say that? Her voice was suddenly taut. She stood up and gripped my arm with unexpected force. I yanked it back like it had been burned, and she let go. The jogger had reached the stage of retching at which nothing was coming back out. I was no longer facing him, but I could identify it purely by sound.
I started walking. My mother trailed behind me in silence. Just before we exited the park, I turned back to glance at him again. Under the jagged leaves of the breadfruit trees, his silhouette cast a shadow like a memory.
* * *
We left the park to go home, rattled. An alien quiet had descended in the alley by my apartment. A woman carrying several large takeout bags from McDonald’s rushed past us, the smell of French fries wafting behind her like a trail of perfume, and scurried into the convenience store around the corner to dump her untouched food in the trash. An elderly man emerged from his restaurant storefront and locked the front door. Though it was only afternoon, I heard the sound of metal grates signifying stores arriving at the end of their business hours slamming up and down the block, echoing bleakly.
Back in my apartment, we watched the news with trepidation. A new early symptom had emerged, a slight yellowing of the skin on one’s hands. They showed several examples: the yellows ranged in shade from virtually invisible to the human eye to a hue of neon highlighter. I turned my head to look at my mother. She was leaning against my futon, head tilted down, examining the backs of her hands.
How is your sister doing? I asked her.
She’s… well, you know, she said. She’s not good.
I looked down at my own hands, which were fidgeting with the trim on a cushion I was strangling unconsciously, and waited for her to continue.
It’s such a shame, she said. I always told her she needed to stop eating such heavy foods. She used to add vinegar to everything, even plain cabbage.
What does that have to do with anything? I said.
They’re saying the cancer is related to her diet. I always knew it would make her sick. I played with my left earring, clicking it open and closed. I didn’t know what to say. You know we were born during the famine, she said. When we were younger, we had nothing. We were always getting sick.
I did know. I had heard the stories of what it had been like for them to grow up during the Cultural Revolution, through the long shadow cast by the Great Famine: the fleshy insects baked inside the plain steamed buns they got at school, the taste of eggs once a year. They’d had an uncle who died in the famine, and their family, being too poor to afford a proper burial, had to leave his bloated body in the field.
It’s such a shame, what happened in the end, she said again. I tried to help her, I really did.
After it was all over, my mother and her sister’s relationships to food and its scarcity shot off in diametrically opposite directions. As China’s economy exploded through the following decades, so too did its food scene, new storefronts springing up with decadent cakes layered like impressionist paintings, oily hot pot crowded with buttery wagyu. My aunt, upon facing this sudden glut of edible luxury, grew to rely on food as her primary source of comfort. Once she learned to eat for pleasure, she couldn’t seem to stop. This stomach cancer was like a perverse joke from God.
My mother, on the other hand, learned to exist in the razor-thin boundary between excess and emptiness. She hoarded food, keeping cans of fried dace in the pantry for as many years as I was alive, refusing to let any of us clean out the refrigerator. Once, digging around for a popsicle that had fallen to the bottom of the freezer, I fished out a plastic bag of unidentifiable meat that had been labeled in her handwriting with the year 2000. She read American cookbooks and baked loaf after loaf of bread, calling me to the kitchen to feed me a fat slice, pouting if I only ate one. The thinner she got, the more she seemed to feast on the act of feeding everyone around her, as if it was enough to project onto us the fantasy of everything she denied herself.
It was my mother who had shown me how to vomit after eating. The first time came on my thirteenth birthday, after we ate at a sushi buffet restaurant. She had taught us to fast for 24 hours before all-you-can-eat meals, like camels storing up their thirst for the first sign of water. When we got back home I laid down in my room, swollen with rice and self-loathing, and she came in and led me to the bathroom. This is how I do it, she told me, demonstrating. In later years, when my esophageal damage was beginning to show, she gifted me boxes of laxative tea, telling me cryptically that it would help me feel cleaner. The text on the packaging was in Chinese, which I could not read. The first time I drank it, I had no idea what was going to happen, or the awareness that anything would happen at all. Twelve hours later, I was on the toilet, stomach writhing in path, releasing what felt like years of accumulated gunk from my intestines. I emerged several pounds lighter, feeling almost holy, having shed excess weight I hadn’t realized was sitting in my body. I understood then, with fearsome clarity: this hunger for cleanness must have been stored somewhere in my genetic code. It was an assault of synapses firing across the brain with an urgency I never chose.
After I left home at eighteen, I stopped calling, stopped opening the emails with forwarded links, eventually stopped responding to her WeChat messages. I hadn’t engaged in these behaviors in years, but now, seeing my mother again, I felt the old itch. The compulsion to erode oneself must have had its roots in the yearning to belong.
She didn’t elaborate more on the status of her sister. She was watching the TV in silence, which was now showing the emaciated bodies of patients in the ICU. I could see the outline of something coagulating behind the fear in her eyes. If I had to describe it, I would say it looked almost like longing.
* * *
It was nighttime, and we hadn’t eaten all day aside from the few bites of breakfast many hours earlier. A wide ache of hunger was bubbling in my stomach.
Were there any other restaurants you were planning to take me? she asked. Before all this happened.
There were a few, I said. A beef noodle shop, a stir-fry restaurant. A place that serves a bunch of deep-fried stuff you can pick out from a display in front.
She was quiet for a moment. What if we go to the fried stuff shop? Would they still be open?
I glanced at her warily. Really? I said.
Well, it’s like you said, she said. Just a few dozen cases, nothing too bad.
I was silent. I thought of the expression on her face when she was watching the victims on the news, how she almost seemed to come alive.
She cleared her throat.
I’ll never be here again, she said. I’d like to do this with you.
Her words seemed to slow down, stretch out like taffy. I pinched the skin on my knees and tried to piece together what she was saying.
She looked so childlike on my futon, sitting with her knees up. I imagined her at age nine, going to school with her sister, eating the mantous studded with black flies, and felt lightheaded, like I could disappear. Danger was all around us, it was so mundane, it was almost a miracle we were sitting together in that moment.
Okay, I said finally. Let’s go. We walked to the restaurant. It felt like a furnace inside: no air-conditioning, only the potent fumes of frying oil rolling out from the kitchen. The boss was about to close up for the night, and until further notice, but he allowed us to sit when I told him my mother was about to leave town.
He emerged soon with a plate of assorted fried food—juicy pieces of chicken thigh, sticky rice mixed with pork blood and cut into Lego-shaped blocks, enoki mushrooms splayed out in crisp golden fans. The whole assortment was showered in an addictive mixture of MSG, white pepper, and salt. The smell was so rich, so unctuous. I couldn’t imagine it hurting us, this luscious pile of food, even though deep down I knew that it could and it would.
I watched as she took a bite. She closed her eyes with obvious pleasure, lips curled almost in a grimace.
We were the only diners left. Condiments sat on the tables of the empty shop, unused, salt crystals clinging to the tips of soy sauce bottles. The tables were a bright plastic red, which cast a burning flush over the walls and tableware. She chewed slowly, with great relish, a slick of oil appearing around her lips.
Thank you for taking me here, she said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear. The hollows of her cheeks looked deeper in the red light, her face glowing like a dying ember.
I opened my mouth to say something and felt it dissolve in the back of my throat, a tiny gasp of negative space. There was something ghostly forming around her, something like the hazy shape of desire, or perhaps the silhouette of the body she would have inhabited had she allowed herself to. I wanted to reach out and grasp it. I wanted to hug her body to mine. The moment passed. She took another bite, and it evaporated into the air between us.
Jacqueline Gu is a writer and journalist currently based in Taipei, Taiwan, formerly based in New York. This is her first published fiction.