Gardening was also a way to teach us about food, something inseparable from our identity as Chinese immigrants, yet food had always been a subject of distress for me when I was young.
The hallmark of any ethnic child who grew up in the West, is the infamous smelly lunch your mom packed by accident. Although you love her dumplings, you and her both know they will stink up the entire lunchroom. You give her a list of things that cannot make its way into the building, basically anything your mom makes is off the table now, so she asks you “Well, what do you want to eat then? White people food? Burgers and fries? You don’t even like Western food!” Then you will get into a fight with your mom and your mom will win, because you are ten years old and she thinks it’s silly to be bothered by other peoples comments. She tells you to ignore them and hands you your lunch.
You go to school angry, you try to eat your red bean bun in secret, half covered by the lid of your lunchbox, but kids can smell fear and next thing you know some boy is cackling and pointing and asking if your eating poop. You vehemently deny it so he asks you a simple question, what is it. You feel the blood rush to your face in embarrassment, because you realize you don’t know the English word so you try to say it in Mandarin, but they only laugh harder.
When your mother picks you up from school with her usual warm self, she asks you how your day went. You think about telling her what happened at lunch, but you can’t bring yourself to explain the disgusted looks of your friends or the snide comments. Yet it’s not the bullying that silences you, instead something uglier grows, something that’s been planted in you from the moment you were brought to this side of the earth, it’s a new feeling, one you’re just starting to experience, it’s called shame. You cannot bear to look your mother in the eye and tell her that you cringe when you hear your parents accented and broken English, that you dread having to translate to the woman at the front desk things you know nothing about, you cannot tell her that she is the primary source of your embarrassment and that’s why you never invite friends over. You cannot describe to her how people look down at them, but worst of all, how you look down on them.
In ten years you will look back and feel a different kind of shame. You will regret the ugly things you felt about your parents. In ten years, something bad will happen to the world, and you will be blamed for it, because of the way you look. And everyone you love, your mother, your father, your brother, your best friend, will have a target on their back wherever they go. You will feel scared at first, but hate cannot exist without love, so you begin the work of loving. You start to love your mother’s lunches and your father’s accent, you start to love Chinese shows and Chinese music, you start to fill the gaps left empty from that trip across the sea so many years ago. In ten years, you will grow tall and proud of where you come from, and you will be sitting on a couch, 490 miles away from home, desperately craving your mom’s homemade red bean bun.