by Leslie Li
Another reason was that my best friend at the time, Patty Cosby, was a cold luncher. Cold-lunch people sat on benches at tables on the opposite side of the room from hot-lunch people. This meant that I couldn’t sit with Patty Cosby.
A cold-lunch person carried a sandwich, thermos of milk, apple, and cookies in a lunchbox, with Lassie, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Betty Boop, or some other much loved character on the lid. A hot luncher carried a tray with a small sweating carton of milk, half a white-bread sandwich (American cheese, peanut butter and raisins, peanut butter and grated carrots, plain margarine, or margarine with orange marmalade), a bowl of soup, and dessert, often canned stewed plums (either purple or greengage), cling peaches in syrup, or fruit cocktail in which the maraschino cherry was nowhere in evidence. The soups — when they weren’t the obvious and commonplace cream of tomato, which I liked, served as it usually was with an American cheese half-sandwich, or lima bean, which I hated, no matter what it was served with — were a profound mystery to me, a challenge to identify in words (thus a spur to the verbal imagination, if not the gastronomic), and my best argument for bringing my lunch from home.
“Today, at lunch, they gave us alligator-skin soup.”
My mother: “Oh, they did not!”
“It was thick and slimy and tough and had lots of ridges and it was greeny-black. It was alligator skin, all right.”
My sister Marcy: “They never give us meat. In our soup or in our sandwich.”
My father: “You just said they gave you alligator skin. That’s meat.”
In second grade, taught by Mrs. Rado, a non-nun, I was still a hot-lunch student, but Patty Cosby was no longer my best friend, having moved away. I got good marks, perfect scores on my tests, especially in catechism and spelling. I studied hard so that I’d know the answers. I didn’t want to make a single mistake. Before tests, I developed butterflies in my stomach. I began pulling the belt to my school jumper tighter. I pulled it to the next to the last eyelet, then to the last. I even made a makeshift eyelet beyond the last one with my mother’s scissors. My strange hourglass figure caught the eye of Sister Anita, who called me into her office and set my belt forward two notches so that I could breathe. Before and after school, I reset my belt the way I liked, an eyelet for an eyelet.
My third grade teacher was Sister Ellen, whose name didn’t suit her. A man’s name would have. Like Constan-tine. She was strict, severe, punitive. But it was fitting that Sister Ellen taught third grade. Third grade was serious, the first whiff of the steadily increasing sobriety and dread that was yet to come. There were more tests in third grade than in second, and they seemed to signify something more than whether or not you’d studied. The grades you received on these tests indicated whether you were smart or stupid. They were, in fact, the sole criterion on which you were judged intelligent or hopelessly incompetent. There seemed to be no way out of the latter, while it was very easy to be banished from the former: one false step and you were out, like the Garden of Eden.
Poor Kevin Cantwell belonged to the second category. As suggested by his name, he never did well, and he was punished mercilessly for it. Once, when he was unable to solve a homework problem in subtraction, Sister Ellen in-structed him to take off his shoes and socks and count on his toes.
“Please, Sister Ellen,” he whined, “please. Ill do my arithmetic homework from now on, I promise.”
But the Sister of Charity was firm. Off came the shoes, exposing socks with holes in both toes. He whimpered abjectly, his multitudinous orange freckles dissolving in his pimiento-red face. Then the socks, revealing almost blue-white dirty feet and toenails thickly rimmed with grime. He blubbered unabashedly.
“Count,” she ordered, having seconds before commanded him to place his unwashed feet on his desktop, for all to see. “No. Not to yourself. Out loud, so all of us can hear. And don’t just point. Grasp each toe as you count it. Stop wiping at your eyes, Kevin. You’ll lose count and then you’ll have to start all over again.”
Start all over again was what he did, several times — losing count while being publicly demeaned and debased was making him despair, and despair never gives you the right answer — before Sister Ellen permitted him to reshoe himself.
I studied hard for these tests, harder than I did in second grade, the fear factor having gone up a few notches. I got good marks, sometimes even 100, though not as often as I did in first and second grades. Arithmetic was getting difficult, tricky. And then there was composition, which almost never merited a 100, though often a 98 if I’d written something with no mistakes in grammar, spelling, or punctuation. There were so many tests that my stomach was filling up with more and more butterflies. Ferocious ones. The injunction “Take every book and scrap of paper off your desks” bred new butterflies, as did the purple-inky smell of the mimeographed test Sister Ellen put on each of our desks. To keep them from fluttering — their wings were now razor-edged — I wrapped my legs around each other, like vines, like a vise, and hunched low over the mimeographed sheet, the test-taking smell of which was nauseating. Soon I was overcome by tears, to which I also bore the additional humiliation of being led weeping to the nurse’s room by a fellow pupil, there to wait for my mother to pick me up and take me home. I hobbled to the nurse’s office, doubled over, snuffling, my arms crossed over my brutalized stomach. I couldn’t straighten up from the pain, which was exacerbated by the thought that I’d fail the test because I was too sick to take it My mother came for me, an anxious look on her face, and drove me home. I was helped into my pajamas and into bed, fed clear consomme, unbuttered toast, and flat ginger ale. They took the edge off my shame, the threat of a goose egg as a test score, the razor-sharp butterfly wings.
These attacks of stomach cramps followed me to fourth grade — taught by jocular Sister Theodocia, who had wattles instead of cheeks — where they were less frequent, less painful, less debilitating. Then they stopped altogether. This rallying of my delicate digestive system may have been due to the fact that I no longer restrained my internal organs with the belt of my school uniform. Or that I’d simply outgrown a strong nervous reaction to the unpleasant but unavoidable scholastic task of test-taking. Or that I’d finally been granted cold-lunch status by my parents. No more remembering or forgetting lunch money on Wednesdays. No more anticipation of alligator-skin soup.
By fifth grade, taught by Miss Mulvaney another non-nun, lunchboxes were considered babyish and, therefore, a social taboo. Lunch bags — waxy and sold as such, or plain brown paper bags that first held a small grocery item — were now the norm. Used brown paper bags had a certain cachet, but they couldn’t be too thin, creased, or wrinkled; they had to be lunch-bag size; they couldn’t have any grease spots, tears, or holes; and they could serve as a lunch bag only once. Hot-lunch money gave way to milk money, which I had no trouble remembering. Everything, in fact, was becoming more streamlined. Particularly by sixth grade, taught by Sister Philomena. Brown paper bags instead of clunky metal lunchboxes. Milk money instead of hot-lunch money. And, for some physically precocious girls, of which I was not one, carrying your books in your arms crossed in front of your breast buds instead of in a bulky leatherette or frankly plastic bookbag, as I did, down by your side.
Now that we were becoming young ladies (not altogether a term signifying increased maturity or status — the more severe teachers referred to a girl who committed an infraction or displeased them in some way as “young lady,” said between gritted teeth, while they still referred to a laggard boy as “sonny,” or “sonny boy,” sometimes taking him by the knot of his navy blue tie and drawing him helplessly close to their hot breath and burning face), we not only needed to act like young ladies but to look the part as well. That is, we had to wear hose. Not sheer nylon hose, but thick cotton lisle stockings — complete with clumsy seams which left a runnel up the back of our legs — the tops of which were held mid-thigh by that instrument of torture and misogyny, a garter belt. This demanding new level of apparel
was inflicted year-round, no matter what the temperature, in June as in December.
Thus attired in calamine-colored lisle stockings over which we wore the requisite navy blue anklets and heavy oxford shoes, we young ladies of St. Margaret’s Parochial School entered seventh grade, when boys began to figure strongly in our thoughts, when a single faux pas could make you a pariah forever, or at least close to a week. For my sisters and me, no matter what grade we were in, any faux pas we committed was doubled by one inherited and irrefutable fact: Nai-nai, who, among other unforgivable embarrassments she caused us, filled our lunch bags with “icky-looking tree bark,” “disgusting animal turds,” and turpentine-laced “poisonous” fruits. All of which we secretly loved (classmates’ squeamishness be damned) and to which she added a fourth delicious offense. Wise woman. The best she saved for last.
Part of why it was best was that this last lunch-bag surprise provoked a more satisfying response from my cold-lunch mates than all the rest: a new variety of dried beef/tree bark, no longer packaged but homemade by Nai-nai. Flank steak was an inexpensive cut of beef of great versatility in Nai-nai’s repertoire, combined as it was with tomatoes and black bean or guy-lan and oyster sauce, or served by itself after having soaked for a while in a bath of soy and spices. I didn’t know what else conspired with the thin slices of meat to turn them into dried beef, but star anise probably played a part, and certainly soy sauce. The sun that beat down on the cookie trays of chili peppers and marinating meat was the alchemical agent that blended the different parts into a unified whole. That, and time.
When I emptied the contents of my lunch bag at school, instead of store-bought dried beef, there lay Nai-nai’s version. And instead of strips of tree bark, my classmates insisted that I’d graduated to chunks of driftwood. I didn’t counter the charge: the meat did not lie flat, as the pressed and packaged dried beef had. Nai-nai’s was thicker, and in the natural drying process it had twisted and buckled and curlicued. But it was also far better than its pale substitute: thinly crackly on the outside, dense, moist, and chewy on the inside, and full of salty, spicy, licoricey flavor. This time, I didn’t even offer the delicacy’s detractors the compliment of the dare: “Want some?”
Beef and Tomatoes in Oyster Sauce
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 tablespoon dry sherry
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 pound flank steak, cut across the grain into ⅛-inch-thick slices 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 onion, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 teaspoon salt
2 tomatoes, cut into wedges
1 teaspoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons ketchup
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
In a bowl stir together the cornstarch, soy sauce, sherry, and granulated sugar. Add the steak. Toss the mixture well, and let the steak marinate for 20 minutes.
In a wok or heavy skillet heat 1 tablespoon of the oil over moderately high heat (hot but not smoking), and stir-fry the onion for 1 minute. Transfer the onion to a plate.
Add the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil to the wok, and heat it until hot but not smoking. Add the garlic. Stir-fry for 45 seconds, or until it is golden. Discard the garlic. Add the steak and the salt. Stir-fry the mixture for 1 minute.
Sprinkle the tomatoes with the brown sugar, and add them to the wok. Stir-fry the mixture until the tomatoes are just heated through. Add the ketchup. Bring the mixture to a boil. Add the onion and the oyster sauce. Stir-fry the mixture for 1 minute.
Makes 4 servings.
CHINESE NEW YEAR
Growing up in Riverdale and attending an elementary school where my sisters and I were the only Chinese made me ambivalent about celebrating Chinese (or Lunar) New Year, a holiday that our schoolmates, none of whose heritage matched our own, did not observe. Falling anywhere between January 21 and February 19, Spring Festival, as the period is better known in China, was a festive occasion that lit up the dreary winter months. My schoolmates had to wait until Easter for a similar reason to celebrate.
Chinese New Year included the best aspects of my favorite Western holidays. Like Easter, there was the requisite new set of clothes and a real parade, complete with a lion and a dragon dance. Like Christmas, we received gifts: for the children, hong hao, red envelopes containing “lucky money”; for the adults, the choicest fruits. Firecrackers went off with as big a bang as on the Fourth of July. Feasting on special foods with family members smacked of Thanksgiving. And like school vacations, the annual celebration varied in length from one day to two weeks, during which time celebrants paid their respects to ancestors and visited with relatives and friends.
As my family observed it, the Lunar New Year culminated in a sumptuous dinner party at Grampa’s house. This impending family get-together always caused my sisters and me a measure of trepidation: Any visit to our grandfather’s required good behavior. Chinese New Year demanded our best.
Best behavior, as we understood it, consisted of two tasks: wishing Grampa “Gung hay fat choy” or “Happy and Prosperous New Year” in Cantonese (the full extent of our Chinese-language skills), and sitting in silence throughout the evening (Chinese children were meant to be seen and not heard, a rule enforced with far more rigor on us than on our more fortunate Western counterparts). The second task was harder.
Thankfully, Grampa, a brilliant military tactician for the Chinese Nationalists during the Sino-Japanese War, had devised a peaceable strategy to nip in the bud our youthful restlessness. No matter how garbled our “Gung bay fat cboy,” he broke into a delighted smile, pinched our cheeks, and played finger games with us — rock-scissors-paper and find-the-index-finger — until he tired of them. Then he urged us toward the coffee table so that he and the other adults could retire to the winter garden to talk over many glasses of tea. The table was set with a blooming narcissus plant, which signifies good fortune and prosperity in the New Year, and an eight-sided “tray of togetherness.” Forgetting all propriety, we raided the tray with abandon, gorging ourselves on candied kumquats, whose initial ideogram represents “gold” and therefore promises prosperity; coconut candy which symbolizes family togetherness; and lotus seeds, whose homonym is “many children.” Totally ignorant of these semantic nuances, we thought we were merely satisfying our penchant for sweets. Little did we know we were also ingesting Chinese cultural concepts and values. Eating our words, if you like.
Sated and sticky, we escaped the grown-ups’ detection and slipped up the stairs on tiptoe, headed for the adjoining bathroom of the master bedroom. We knew it was off-limits, but that made our adventure all the more exciting. There it was, on a table spread with all her beauty preparations — unguents, creams, lotions, potions — all of Chinese manufacture and so their labels indecipherable, all the more mysterious. And treacherous, like her. We knew she was treacherous and evil because our father didn’t like her.
“How do you know that Daddy doesn’t like Madam?”
My mother: “Precisely for that reason: he calls her ‘Madam.’”
“What’s wrong with that?”
My mother: “She always wanted him to call her ‘Mother.’ And that he would never do.”
“If I didn’t like somebody, I could think of a lot worse names than ‘Madam’ to call them.”
Grampa and Nai-nai were physically separated about a year after they were married. Grampa, who was on one or another battlefield during the internecine regional wars raging in China during the 1920s, met Dejie (Madam) and took her as his second wife. She was beautiful, educated, young (sixteen to his thirtysomething), and was a politically appropriate wife for the rising star that my grandfather was at that time. Except for one year in Canton, Nai-nai never lived with Grampa again. Dejie was very possessive of Grampa and did everything possible to usurp Nai-nai’s place.
We spotted what we had come to see, the proof we ardently desired, and recoiled as if it were
poison, before we drew near, since it was also irresistible. A small porcelain mortar and pestle. A glass of milky liquid, half empty. We examined the pestle closely for evidence.
“Don’t touch it. You’ll drop it, and it’ll break,” Marcy whispered. “Then won’t we be in a fix!”
Sure enough, along the rim of the bowl was a trace of something finer than sand, coarser than talcum powder, and shimmeringly white. What we’d once overheard my mother say about Madam — that she was very vain, that she ate pearls to maintain her youthful complexion — was now verified, even if we hadn’t found the raw proof, only the refined remnants.
“The Pearl-Eater,” we tittered, both horrified and gleeful, listening with one ear cocked just in case she was on to us and was heading up the stairs at that very moment. “The Pearl-Eater!”
Usually it was my mother who found us, who knew what it was we were looking for and, by our Cheshire-cat smiles, that we had found it. We were then sent to the kitchen to “help” Aiying, Grampa’s cook, and Regina, her English-speaking associate, prepare dinner. The two women had been forewarned of our arrival, along with Grampa’s intentions for us, and were already at their battle stations, ready to work their wizardry while keeping us occupied. Standing in front of the wok, Regina guided us in dropping, one by one, hard pink and white disks the size of quarters into the hot, smoking oil, where they sizzled and sputtered and bubbled away. When she fished them out with a pair of long chopsticks and placed them on paper towels to cool and dry, the semi-translucent “food coins” had magically transformed into shrimp chips, feather-light pastel wafers that stuck to the tongue like Velcro and dissolved there like ice. As for Aiying, she manned the kitchen table groaning under hundreds of jiaozi, or dumplings.