Brain Freeze

by Oliver Phommavanh

  ‘Er, yeah,’ Dad mutters.

  ‘Why haven’t you brought me here before?’ Mum asks.

  Dad turns away. ‘Well . . .’

  Uncle Leo comes out with a plate of prawn crackers for us to share. Dad stuffs a cracker into his mouth.

  One by one, Uncle Leo introduces the dishes like they’re old friends. I guess they are to Grandpa.

  ‘Firstly, we have lemon chicken,’ Uncle Leo says.

  I twist my mouth. ‘It’s just a chicken schnitzel with lemon sauce on it,’ I whisper through the side of my mouth.

  Grandpa breathes it in. ‘Doesn’t it smell wonderful?’

  ‘So, if we ordered honey chicken, would it be a chicken schnitzel with honey?’ I ask.

  Uncle Leo returns with the beef in black bean sauce, which is basically an oil spill with floating beef pieces.

  Mum wants to laugh but she’s holding it back like it’s a sneeze.

  A few minutes later, Uncle Leo comes running in with a sizzling hot plate. ‘Mongolian Lamb,’ he announces.

  I’m not sure the lamb in Mongolia would look like this. It looks like the lamb is swimming in chocolate sauce.

  Grandpa grabs his chopsticks and picks up a piece of lamb. ‘Dig in everyone.’

  ‘I’m waiting for the rice,’ Mum and Dad say, at the same time.

  ‘Me too,’ I add.

  Uncle Leo must have heard us, because he arrives with a small pot of steamed rice and the last dish. ‘Sweet and sour pork,’ he says.

  I stare at the neon pink sauce. Does it glow in the dark? I’m tempted to turn the lights off and find out.

  Grandpa goes for a piece of pork and his lips quiver. ‘It’s exactly how I remember it,’ he says.

  ‘I made it extra sweet for you,’ Uncle Leo says. ‘Enjoy everyone!’

  Mum and Dad’s faces melt as they smell the food. Dad goes for the lamb and Mum starts hacking into the lemon chicken with her fork. I help myself to some rice and some beef in black bean sauce. It feels like the kind of stuff you see at food courts, where you can pile as much as you can onto your plate.

  The beef is nice and chewy, but it’s just so sweet. I try the lemon chicken and it’s the same. My head thinks it’s lemon cheesecake.

  Grandpa is savouring each bite. ‘What do you think, Joanna?’ he says between gulps.

  I try the sweet and sour pork with a mountain of rice. It’s no use, it still tastes so sickly sweet. Grandpa’s pouring the sauce into his bowl of rice and it looks like a strawberry sundae.

  There’s way too much for us to finish so Uncle Leo breaks out the plastic containers so we can take it home. I think it’s only Grandpa who’ll be eating the leftovers.

  ‘Now, Uncle Leo,’ Grandpa says, picking at his teeth with a toothpick. ‘Your niece here needs to take a dish for her school cultural day.’

  Uncle Leo’s glazed eyes remind me of the oily black bean sauce. ‘I can cook anything you’d like,’ he says.

  ‘Actually,’ I say, feeling flushed all over, partly from all the sugar, ‘we have to cook it ourselves.’

  ‘We were wondering if you could give us the recipe,’ Grandpa says for me. ‘Maybe for your sweet and sour pork?’

  ‘It would be an honour,’ Uncle Leo says. He goes to the counter and takes a page from his notepad. He starts writing in giant block letters.

  1/3 CUP PINEAPPLE JUICE

  2 TBSP TOMATO SAUCE

  ½ CUP BROWN SUGAR

  ¼ TSP CHINESE FIVE SPICE

  1 TBSP SOY SAUCE

  ¼ CUP VINEGAR

  2 TSP CORNFLOUR

  2 TBSP WATER

  ¼ CUP CARAMEL

  No wonder it feels like I’ve eaten a bag of caramel kisses.

  ‘Thank you, Uncle Leo,’ I say.

  We pay for our meal and Uncle Leo gives us all fortune cookies as we leave.

  ‘Come back soon,’ Uncle Leo says.

  I bite into my fortune cookie. It actually tastes bland after all that sweetness. Mine reads: Failure is the chance to do better next time.

  We hop into the car. Mum’s got the laugh hiccups. ‘That was like going back in time,’ she says. ‘My goodness.’

  Grandpa gazes out the car window, clutching onto Uncle Leo’s restaurant flyer. I look down at Uncle Leo’s recipe for his sweet and sour pork. There’s no way I’m ever making this for school. Everyone will laugh at me. It’s the kind of Aussie Chinese food that people ate in the eighties.

  I get home and put Uncle Leo’s recipe aside. I open up my laptop and search some other sweet and sour pork recipes. There are tons of them, and not just from China, but also Malaysia, Indonesia and even American-Chinese ones that look like Uncle Leo’s dish. I pick the best traditional recipe and print it out. Sorry Grandpa, but I don’t want to embarrass myself and make a dish that is going to give everyone a massive sugar rush.

  The next day at school, I ask Lia what she’s making for our cultural day.

  ‘My parents are cooking some beef rendang,’ Lia says.

  ‘That sounds cool.’

  ‘Not really,’ Lia says. ‘We have it every week. Dad calls it his version of the Sunday roast.’

  I laugh. I can’t imagine Dad cooking the same thing every Sunday. Make that cooking, full stop.

  Lengy and Rajiv are having paper plane fights. Mr Winfree made them sit on separate tables on either side of the classroom, but it hasn’t stopped them from mucking around. A paper plane lands on my desk and Lengy comes up to fetch it.

  ‘Hey, Joanna.’

  ‘Hey, Lengy,’ I say, handing it back to him. ‘Have you ever heard of Aussie Chinese food?’

  Lengy nods. ‘You mean stuff like lemon chicken that looks like chicken schnitzel with sweet lemon sauce poured all over it?’

  I crack up and slap my knee. ‘Spot on.’

  ‘Yeah, Dad used to go on about an old Chinese place that would cook that kind of sweet stuff.’

  ‘I want my parents to cook traditional Chinese food.’

  ‘Same here,’ Lengy says.

  I click my tongue. ‘You want your parents to cook Chinese food?’

  Lengy crouches down next to me. ‘No, I want them to make a traditional Thai dish, like a jungle hot curry packed with chilli,’ he says. ‘But they’re too scared to make anything that spicy for the class.’

  ‘I love spicy food,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, well don’t worry. I’m working on a plan to make my parents cook something hot,’ he says with a cheeky grin. I’ve seen that look before. It means trouble can’t be far behind.

  Lengy grabs the plane and flies it low to Rajiv, but the plane takes a sharp turn and it glides between Mr Winfree’s legs and straight under his desk.

  ‘Eeeek!’ Lengy squeals and quickly rushes back to his table before sir can turn around.

  Maybe I should take a page out of Lengy’s troublemaker manual and make a plan to convince my parents to cook something traditional too.

  That evening, I print out a whole bunch of recipes and show them to Mum and Dad. ‘Here’s what we can make together,’ I say.

  ‘What happened to Uncle Leo’s recipe?’ Mum asks.

  I check to see if Grandpa’s around. Thankfully, he’s napping upstairs in his room. ‘I don’t think my class would like that kind of food.’

  ‘You sure?’ Dad asks. ‘Your classmates are Aussies, right?’

  I think about Lia and Lengy. ‘Yeah, but they want to try something really different.’

  Dad scans the list of ingredients. ‘We don’t have half of these things.’

  ‘That’s why we’re lucky that it’s shopping night,’ I say, grabbing his car keys. ‘Think about my grades.’

  Dad sighs and follows me out the door.

  An hour later, Dad and I come back with a bag full of things for our sweet and sour experiment. ‘I think if we nail the sauce then the rest should be easy,’ I say.

  ‘You’re the boss,’ Mum says.

  I stop for a second and smile to myself. It’s not every
day I get to boss my parents around.

  I line up the bottles of pineapple juice, tomato sauce and white vinegar. It’s hard to believe that we’re making a sauce. I checked out the writer of the recipe, Jennifer Lan, to make sure she wasn’t six years old or something. She does use some of the same things that were in Uncle Leo’s recipe, but at least Jennifer includes other things like plum sauce and oyster sauce. I wonder if the first person who made sweet and sour pork was just trying to clear out their half-used sauce bottles in their fridge.

  We pour all the ingredients in a bowl and Dad whisks it until it turns into a brown bear coloured syrup. So far, so good.

  I get a teaspoon to taste it. ‘Yikes,’ I say. ‘At the moment, sour is beating sweet 70–30.’

  Mum pours some sugar into the mix and stirs it up. It’s her turn to try it. ‘Ooooo,’ she whines. ‘Maybe a bit more sugar . . .’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I say, going in for another taste. The vinegar zooms up my nose. ‘Yikes!’

  I pour in a bit more plum sauce and mix it up. The sour is still kicking the sweet’s butt 60–40. If I take this in for next week’s cultural day, I’ll have people walking around with prune lips. I check the recipe again. ‘Do we need more oyster sauce?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Mum says, putting in another spoonful of sugar.

  I go in for another taste. Now the sweet is overpowering the sour. ‘It just tastes like syrup now.’

  ‘Let’s try again,’ Dad says.

  We make a new batch and our sauce ends up way too sweet again.

  The next batch is sour central.

  I start keeping score of the sweet versus sour battle.

  By the time the score is Sweet 3, Sour 5, I’m turning into glum sauce. Why is it so hard to balance the sweet and sour?

  Our ninth batch of sauce is headed towards a sour win. Grandpa enters the kitchen. ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘We’re trying to make sweet and sour sauce,’ Dad says.

  ‘Uncle Leo’s recipe is pretty easy to follow.’ Grandpa takes a sip of our latest batch. ‘Ahhhh, it’s almost there. You just forgot to put in the caramel.’ He goes into the pantry and grabs a packet of his caramel drops.

  I tug his arm. ‘No, Yeye.’

  ‘Now, I know that this isn’t real caramel,’ Grandpa says. ‘But you can buy some next time at the shops.’

  He unwraps a caramel drop.

  Mum and Dad swap worried looks. I thump the bench. ‘I don’t want to make your kind of sweet and sour pork.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Grandpa says. Stacks of wrinkles appear on his forehead. ‘I thought all Aussies liked Uncle Leo’s . . .’

  ‘Maybe you and Nainai did,’ I say.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking . . .’

  ‘That’s why everybody loves Thai food now,’ I say. ‘Aussies don’t want neon pink sweet and sour pork that glows in the dark.’

  Grandpa looks like he just drank a whole cup of lemon juice. His face looks like a battered fish. He puts the caramel drop down and shuffles off like his slippers are tied together.

  Dad touches my shoulder. ‘Joanna, you shouldn’t –’

  ‘I know,’ I snap, feeling flustered. ‘I just . . .’

  Mum and Dad don’t say any more. They just leave me alone in the kitchen. I pick up the bowl with sour potion no.9, ready to tip it into the sink. Then I look at Grandpa’s caramel drop. It looks like a tear drop and now my eyes are on the edge of teary waterfall. I grab the caramel drop and pop it into my mouth. Then I sip a spoonful of sauce and close my eyes.

  A tear trickles down my eye.

  A tear of joy.

  I pour some sauce into a tiny bowl and grab the packet of caramel drops, carrying them to Grandpa’s room.

  ‘Can I come in?’ I say, standing by the door.

  ‘What is it?’ Grandpa presses pause on the Chinese news video on his iPad.

  ‘You were right, Yeye,’ I whisper, handing him a bowl of sauce and the packet of caramel drops. He takes one and sips the sauce. A smile creeps on his face. ‘Ah, it’s got that perfect sweet and sour tang.’

  ‘It’s not as sweet as Uncle Leo’s, but I hope that’s okay,’ I say. ‘Sorry if I offended you and Nainai.’

  Grandpa puts the bowl on the bedside table, next to the picture of him with Grandma. He picks it up and touches her face. ‘She would have been proud of you, Joanna.’

  My memory of Nainai had been partly cloudy, but seeing her picture again now lifts away those clouds. I remember more parts of Nainai. Her curly blonde hair. Her tanned bronze skin. Her kind blue eyes.

  ‘When I found out that she loved Chinese food, I had to take her to Lucky Leo’s,’ Grandpa says. ‘I’ve had good fortune, ever since.’

  ‘So, Grandma was your fortune cookie?’ I say.

  Grandpa chuckles. ‘Do you know how Uncle Leo makes the sweet and sour pork so pink?’

  I shrug. ‘A ton of strawberry icing?’

  ‘Food colouring,’ Grandpa says. ‘That’s all. It doesn’t have to be pink. It could be any colour you like.’

  Dad knocks on the door. ‘I hope you don’t mind Joanna, but Mum’s used that sauce to cook up some pork cubes,’ he says. ‘Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.’

  ‘Cool, thanks Dad,’ I say.

  Grandpa and I make our way downstairs. I set the table and Dad scoops up the steamed rice. Mum lays the sweet and sour pork in the middle, mixed in with chunks of onion and capsicum.

  ‘Sorry if it’s a little too sour,’ Mum says.

  ‘Don’t worry, we have these,’ I say, putting the packet of caramel drops on the table. ‘Just in case.’

  We all dig in and demolish the dish. Mum beams as she picks up some pork with chopstick. ‘Maybe I should cook more often.’

  It turns out we didn’t need the caramel drops after all. Sour still wins by 60–40. But I look around at all the satisfied smiles and realise it’s sweet enough.

  Mum and Dad nailed the sweet and sour sauce, thanks to Grandpa’s caramel suggestion. Now the pork has a nice tang to it. I write down the recipe, just in case we want to make some more. We call it Leung Sweet and Sour Pork. Now Mum’s looking at more recipes on her phone in her spare time. I guess it is a magical potion.

  On cultural day, I take my dish to 7R5 for the multicultural lunch. Lengy’s already there with his dish, or should I say dishes, because once again he’s brought in a mini Thai buffet. He jumps as I walk into the room, looking guilty as he stirs something into one of the dishes.

  ‘Oh, phew, it’s only you,’ he says, with his eyeballs still on lookout patrol.

  I put my dish down next to his. ‘This is Leung Sweet and Sour Pork.’

  Lengy breathes it in. ‘It’s not pink. That’s awesome!’

  I nod. At least he gets it. ‘It’s a secret family recipe.’

  Lengy licks his lips. ‘Looks great,’ he says. ‘And it’s extra saucy, like my super curry.’

  ‘Yeah, my parents made it authenic.’

  We both smile at each other. If only he knew the truth.

  The MO (Melissa’s Opinion)

  Why I hate Jake Kola so very, very much.

  Sunday, 27 June

  By Melissa Phu

  Jake Kola is a fake. That is a fact. Well, it’s my opinion but trust me, it’s true. Jake is a deadset pretender. Reporters need evidence to back up their statements, even wannabe reporters like me. I’ll get to that later, but I can already see my future article up in the local Wide Bay Chronicles newspaper, with my name, Melissa Phu, at the bottom.

  I already have my title: ‘Fake Jake!’.

  Every day at school, when I see Jake’s face in the library, I’m reminded of why I hate him so much. His face is on a poster, surrounded by the covers of his three bestselling novels in the Boonana series.

  Last year, Jake Kola brought in a story for our writing assignment in Year Five. That should have set off the suss alarms because Jake has never written anything outside of his name. Teachers ha
d given up making him stay in at lunch to finish his work because they’d starve to death.

  Anyway, he wrote this story about a ghost detective named Boonana, solving mystery cases in a ghost world. Our old Year Five teacher, Mrs Henderson, loved it. She forced Jake to enter it in some national story competition. Jake won first prize and one of the judges worked for a publisher.

  Long story short, Jake’s short story became a long book and in one year, he became a mega-famous author. All the other TV and newspaper journalists keep gushing about the fact that he’s written three books at the age of eleven and how good his imagination is and blah blah blah.

  So, how’s this for a news flash? He is a fake.

  Actually, my friend Jane got the scoop first. I didn’t mean to tell her, it just came out. You see, I was in the school library, stacking shelves as a library monitor. I saw his poster and I couldn’t resist. I took out a whiteboard marker I’d found on the front desk and wrote FAKE on his stupid forehead.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Jane asked, coming out from the non-fiction section and snatching the marker out of my hands.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  Jane wiped the word off the poster with a tissue, leaving a bit of a black smudge. ‘Why do you hate Jake so much?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t write his own books,’ I blurted out.

  Jane dropped the marker. ‘What do you mean?’

  I took out my notebook from my back pocket. Every reporter has a notebook to jot down ideas for their articles and, trust me, I’ve been writing pages and pages for my Jake article.

  I picked up one of Jake’s books, Boonana: Volume 2, and weighed it in my hand. ‘This book has about 200 pages,’ I said.

  ‘So?’ Jane said.

  ‘Have you ever seen Jake put pen to paper for longer than ten seconds?’ I asked, flipping through to a graph in my notebook. ‘I tracked his classwork productivity and he did less than half an hour of work in one day. And that was on the computers, when he was secretly playing a game.’

  Jane put her hands on her hips. ‘That doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘Okay, well where does he find the time to write these books?’ I asked. ‘He’s a basketballer, skateboarder and gamer . . .’

  ‘I’m sure he found the time to squeeze it in,’ Jane said, grabbing the book off me.