With my feet now cozy in my yellow fuzzy slippers, I grab a pile of paper and some pencils and head downstairs to set up my supplies at the kitchen table. Liza and Frankie are coming over to work on our social studies project, and I want to have everything ready. It’ll just be the three of us, but my mother is cooking enough food for the entire seventh grade. Right now there are xiā jiăo (shrimp dumplings) boiling, bean thread noodles sautéing, and some kind of whole fish baking in the oven. I told her not to go overboard, but she couldn’t help herself.
“They are your first friends in Brooklyn,” she said. “I will not allow them to go home hungry. Besides, food is strength. You will need it for your assignment.” Even though my mother has lived in the U.S. for decades, she still believes that the “Chinese way” is the best way, and it’s like she has a hard drive in her brain full of old sayings and proverbs for pretty much every situation. There’s no arguing with her about food or homework, so I don’t even try. I just hope that Liza and Frankie are hungry—and that they like Chinese food.
The doorbell rings and I run to answer it. I’m still not used to the skinny hallway that leads to the front door—you practically have to hold your breath just to squeeze by the stairs.
“Oh my God, what is that smell?” Liza asks as soon as I open the door. “I could smell it halfway down the block!”
“Oh, that’s just my mother. She’s making us something to eat,” I say, cringing. “I hope you’re not grossed out.”
“Grossed out?” Liza says, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply, like our gym teacher, Tanya, taught us to do in a yoga demo. “Are you kidding? It’s like a restaurant in here!” She looks at Frankie and tugs on her sleeve. “Don’t you think so, Franks?”
Frankie nods. “Oh yeah, definitely,” she says, looking at Liza. She’s smiling, but I get the feeling she’s being sarcastic.
I close the door and lead them to the kitchen—after they take off their shoes—where my mother has laid out plates for each of us with a little of everything on them. We settle at the table, and she brings us steaming cups of jasmine tea.
“You must be Liza and Frankie,” my mother says. “I am Dr. Wong. Lillian has really been looking forward to your visit.”
“Ma.” I cringe. I cannot believe she just said that. As if they didn’t already think I was an enormous dork.
“Did you really make this, Dr. Wong?” Liza asks. She can’t take her eyes off the food, so maybe she didn’t hear my mother make me sound like a total loser.
“This?” my mother says, as if she’d handed us a hunk of Velveeta and a box of saltines. Chinese people are superstitious about accepting compliments, and my mom is a master at pretending to be modest. “Just a little snack. I hope you like fish.”
“It looks delicious,” Liza says, picking up her chopsticks like a pro and taking a bite. I can tell my mother is impressed that she knows how to use them. “Mmmmm. Oh wow, this is so good.”
Frankie obviously doesn’t have as much practice and scowls as she stabs at her noodles, unable to grasp any long enough to reach her mouth. Seeing this, my mother immediately grabs a fork from the drawer and places it on the table next to Frankie’s plate. Frankie gives her another one of those half smiles. “Thanks.”
Frankie’s reaction doesn’t faze my mother, and she’s clearly pleased with the impression she and her spread have made. “I will leave you to your project now, girls,” she says. “There’s plenty more on the stove if you’re hungry. Lillian, don’t forget to offer your friends seconds.”
Ugh. Did she have to say that? I hardly know Liza and Frankie, and while I’m dying to make some new friends, I don’t want them to think I told my mother we were BFFs or anything.
“Does your mom always cook like this?” Frankie asks after my mom has finally left the room.
“Pretty much,” I say with a shrug.
Frankie raises her eyebrow and puts down her fork. Like most of her looks, I’m not sure what it means, but I feel my cheeks starting to burn and I’m pretty sure I’m about to turn as red as the string of chili peppers hanging next to the stove.
“The idea that someone might leave her house hungry is my mother’s worst nightmare,” I say. “It’s really embarrassing.”
“Embarrassing?” says Liza. “Um, are you kidding? Your mom is amazing! This is so much better than the Chinese takeout my mom always gets.”
“Thanks,” I say, thinking about how fun it would be to order takeout of any kind sometime. My mother is a snob when it comes to food, especially Chinese food. She thinks all of the Chinese restaurants around here are too “Americanized” and won’t let us eat at any of them. “Who knows where they get their ingredients?” my mother said with a snooty face the one time I asked. MeiYin Wong definitely does not do takeout.
“You should be grateful your mom can cook like this,” Frankie says, poking at a xiā jiăo. “Mine can barely pour cereal.”
Liza laughs. “That’s true,” she says, “but your dad is a great cook. You have nothing to complain about.”
“Yeah,” says Frankie, “but if I keep eating so much three-alarm chili and four-cheese lasagna, I’m going to end up looking like a five-hundred-pound sumo wrestler.” Frankie puffs out her cheeks and puts her arms around her imaginary potbelly, but the real Frankie is anything but fat. She’s thin, but not too thin—the kind of girl who looks good in anything she wears. I’m a typical Asian girl, skinny and straight as a twig. If I didn’t have long hair, you’d swear I was a boy. My sister, Katie, is fifteen, and she’s still shaped just like me (except that she’s gorgeous and brilliant and talented and perfect).
Frankie gives up on her dumpling and pushes away her plate. “So,” she says, “we should probably start brainstorming ideas for our social studies project, right?” If you really think about it, the word “brainstorming” sounds pretty creepy, but teachers in New York seem to use it as often as my teachers in California did.
While Liza slurps down the last of her noodles, I move my pile of paper to the middle of the table and hand everyone a sharpened pencil.
Frankie puts down the chewed-up pencil stub she was using and dramatically touches the point of the pencil I gave her as if it were the blade of a knife. “Wow, Lillian,” she says. “Everything around here is perfect, isn’t it?” She makes quotes with her fingers around the word “perfect,” and I feel my cheeks start to burn again.
“Seriously,” says Liza, smiling as she looks around my mother’s spotless, organized kitchen. “Do you think your parents would mind if I moved in?” She’s kidding, but in a good way, and I start to relax, even though Frankie rolls her eyes.
Finally, we put our plates in the sink and get down to business, trying to come up with a good idea for our project. Mr. McEnroe says we have to “explore an aspect of immigration”—but which one, and how? We each throw out ideas, but none of them is The One, at least according to Frankie. Liza says maybe we could do an oral history on the journey to America, but who would we interview? The only immigrants we can think of that we could talk to in person are Frankie’s grandparents, but she says one set is in Italy taking care of a sick relative, and the other set is too hard to understand. Or my parents, I guess, but there’s not much history to record when it comes to their journey.
I suggest that we focus on the lives of immigrant kids. But Liza says she overheard Stacy Marcus’s group talking about doing their project on children, and Frankie thinks it’s “unoriginal” to choose the same topic as someone else. She crosses that suggestion off the list right away. Her own idea is to do a photo essay on the kinds of clothes different immigrant groups wore, but then she decides that a project about fashion doesn’t feel “brilliant” enough.
After a while our brainstorming feels more like “brain drizzling,” and we decide we’ve worked hard enough for one afternoon. Liza looks out the back door and notices the giant pumpkin growing in our garden, so we all go outside to look at it. Liza says that it’s the biggest pumpkin
she’s ever seen and that if she were me, she couldn’t wait to turn it into a jack-o’-lantern. I don’t tell her that I’ve never actually carved a jack-o’-lantern because Halloween is one of the “silly American traditions” my parents don’t bother celebrating. Frankie looks bored and gives the pumpkin a little kick, until Liza knocks her foot out of the way.
“I can’t take her anywhere,” Liza jokes. She’s smiling, but I can tell she’s squeezing Frankie’s hand harder than she has to as she pushes her toward the front door.
After Liza and Frankie leave, I’m in such a good mood that I get started on the rest of my homework without my mother having to bug me about it. So what if we still haven’t decided on a topic for our social studies project and Frankie wasn’t exactly friendly? Liza is really nice, and for two whole hours I didn’t even think about my old school or Sierra and Chloe once, which makes it the best afternoon I’ve had in Brooklyn so far.
CHAPTER 7
Liza
When I get off the bus from Lillian’s, it’s five thirty, which means right now my mom is probably rushing out of her office to pick up my two-year-old brother, Cole, from the day-care center in her building. She’s an editor for a parenting magazine, which is kind of funny when you consider how frazzled being a parent makes her. I’m what’s known as a “latchkey kid,” so I’m pretty much on my own until my mom gets home. Before my parents got divorced and money wasn’t so tight, I had a nanny named Sonya who helped take care of me from the time I was three months old until Cole was born and my mom went on maternity leave. Sonya was like part of the family, and I really miss her. She still comes over to visit sometimes, but it’s not the same.
I’m still full from the feast Lillian’s mom made for us, but as soon as I walk in the door, I open the refrigerator like I always do. Just out of habit. The inside of our fridge is a pitiful sight. Other than juice, milk, and an old bottle of Sprite that went flat sometime in June, there are exactly seven things inside: a bag of baby carrots, applesauce for Cole, a bottle of hot sauce, blueberry jam, two peaches, and a big tub of plain low-fat yogurt that my mom eats with granola every morning.
I close the fridge and pour myself a glass of water from the faucet. Cole’s half-empty sippy cup and his cereal bowl with soggy Cheerios from this morning floating in it are still in the sink, so I load them into the dishwasher, which I discover hasn’t been run since the weekend. It’s like this most of the time these days. My mom is so busy that if we’re not close to running out of plates or clean clothes, she decides that the dishes and the laundry can wait. I try to help out as much as I can, but it’s so quiet around here in the afternoons that I usually go over to Frankie’s, where being alone is basically impossible. Even Lillian’s spotless, orderly house felt friendlier to me than our apartment does when it’s just me by myself. If it weren’t for Cole’s blanket crumpled up on the couch and his Thomas trains on the floor near the fireplace, I think even the furniture might get lonely. Mom and Dad were starting to look for a new place—a bigger one—after Cole was born, but then my dad got a job offer in L.A. and, well, the rest is history.
Since we spent the afternoon working on our project—even if we never actually came up with a topic—I plop down on the couch and decide to reward myself with a half hour of TV before starting on the rest of my homework. My favorite show of the moment comes on at five thirty, so I’ve only missed the beginning. It’s a cooking show called Antonio’s Kitchen, and the host is this really funny guy named Chef Antonio Garcia. Frankie says I’m a cooking show addict, and I guess it’s true. I’m totally obsessed with them, and so is my mom. I like Antonio’s Kitchen best because they tape the show right here in Brooklyn, and sometimes they even show Chef Antonio shopping for ingredients at the same stores my mom and I go to. Used to go to, I mean, before the Big D, a.k.a. my parents’ divorce.
Today Chef Antonio is making roast chicken and potatoes, and it looks so good, I can almost smell it through the TV. The whole idea of the show is that you can make really amazing, delicious meals with basic, local ingredients that you can get right in your own neighborhood. Chef Antonio cooks all different types of food, but since he’s Cuban, he likes to add a little bit of spice to everything. That’s kind of the way my mom cooks too (when she cooks, that is). She’s from Atlanta, and she likes her food spicy. No matter how long it is between trips to the grocery store, there’s always at least one bottle of hot sauce in the fridge at our own house.
Even though I pigged out at Lillian’s, Chef Antonio’s chicken is making me hungry. It’s almost six, and my mom and Cole will be home soon, so I open our “dinner drawer” and start flipping through the stack of takeout menus. While I’m debating between Indian and Middle Eastern, a commercial at the end of the show catches my attention. Antonio’s Kitchen is on our local PBS station, so there aren’t usually commercials, but this one is an ad for a cooking class with Chef Antonio as the teacher.
“If you love our show,” Chef Antonio says as if he’s talking directly to me, “then you’ll go loco for my live, six-week cooking class right here in our studio!”
I drop the menus on the counter. I would so go loco for that class.
“This session’s theme is American Cooking 101,” Chef tells me. “Over the course of six two-hour classes, we’ll explore the vast array of cultures and cooking traditions that make up the melting pot we now think of as distinctly American cuisine. And as always, we’ll put the Antonio’s Kitchen spin on your favorite classic recipes, with fresh seasonal ingredients, a little imagination, and a whole lot of flavor.”
Just then I hear a key in the lock and, “Uppy me, Mama, uppy me!” I turn around to see the door swing open with my mom behind it, carrying bags over one arm and trying to pick up cranky Cole with the other. I rush over to take her briefcase from her, along with Cole’s Curious George backpack and a bag of apples. My little brother is really sweet most of the time, but when he’s tired and hungry, he’s like a mini supervillain and it’s best to just let my mom deal with him.
“What’s for dinner, Lize?” my mom asks as she settles Cole into his high chair and grabs a hot dog from the freezer. Hot dogs are Cole’s favorite, so I try not to think about the article we read in health class about all of the disgusting things that are actually in them. At least the ones we have are organic, and to be honest, I like them too. My mom pops Cole’s dinner into the microwave and looks up at the TV. Chef Antonio is slicing up his roast chicken while the credits roll on the bottom of the screen. “Mmm, now that looks good,” Mom says. “And so does he! Do you think he delivers?”
I laugh, even though I still don’t like it when my mom makes comments about men who aren’t my dad, and hand her the menus I’d been considering before the commercial distracted me. She spreads them out on the counter and studies them as she washes and peels an apple for Cole. My mom is a master multitasker. Seriously, she could teach courses in it. She can bathe Cole, help me with my homework, and polish her own toenails all at the same time.
We agree on Middle Eastern, and I call in our order while my mom makes sure that at least some of Cole’s dinner actually makes it into his mouth. (Don’t ask me why, but my brother insists on mashing food into his hair whenever he can—his food, my food, any food.) A new show has started on TV, but it’s not about cooking, so I turn it off.
“How was your day, Lize?” my mom asks as she scrubs practically Cole’s entire head with a baby wipe. “Have you finished your homework?”
Before I can answer either of her questions, she’s already halfway to Cole’s room to get him ready for bed. I pull my math folder out of my backpack and try to make sense of tonight’s worksheet. I’ve always been good at math, but this year it’s pre-algebra and some of the problems just make my brain hurt.
I’m about halfway done when the doorbell rings, and suddenly, there’s Cole, running down the hallway in his diaper yelling, “Dinner! Dinner!” He’s right this time, but the really funny thing is that he says that every time
the doorbell rings, no matter what time of day it is. Sometimes Frankie picks me up on the way to school in the morning, and even when she rings the bell at seven forty-five a.m., Cole comes racing to the door, fully expecting to see the deliveryman waiting there with a big white bag.
My mom comes in, scoops up Cole, and tosses her purse at me. I pay the delivery guy and start setting out our food on the coffee table while Mom gets Cole settled in his crib and reads him a story. Our apartment does have an actual dining table, but we have this nightly ritual where we watch the cooking channel together and eat our dinner in front of the TV. I know, I know, kids do better in school and don’t end up doing drugs when families sit down at the table for dinner. But so far I’ve never gotten below a B and I don’t even know anyone who does drugs, so I don’t think our mother-daughter TV dinners are going to mess me up too much.
By the time my mom has finished reading to Cole, I’ve arranged our meals on our plates like they do in food magazines and I’ve poured us both iced tea in my favorite polka-dot glasses. When I turn on the TV, it’s still on PBS and that same commercial for Chef Antonio’s cooking class comes on again. I watch the ad a second time while my mom changes into sweatpants—she says whoever invented work clothes must have hated being comfortable.
Chef Antonio looks me in the eye and tells me every class will feel like a fiesta. I’ve never been to a fiesta, but even the word sounds fun. My mom plops herself down on the couch and glances at the TV. “A cooking class, huh? I used to love those,” she says as she unwraps the napkin around her plastic silverware. “But seriously, who has the time?” She digs in to her takeout shish kebab and takes a long sip of iced tea.
And just like that, I have an idea. An absolutely amazing, totally brilliant idea. I can’t wait to tell Frankie about it.
Kitchen Chaos Page 3