I’ll Find You With Golden Buns by Isabella Wu

I am born into the world screaming, my breaths stuttering against the blankets that swaddle me. The air around me stenches of subdued hope, warm fingertips weigh down my eyelids and there is the soft feeling of lips against my blushing cheeks.

“有一天她会让我们感到自豪,” whispers a voice. She will make us proud one day. My grandpa’s words are slow and deliberate.

I am born into the world with hope on my shoulders, an anchor of love on my chest.

At five years old, I taste brilliance for the first time. I’m standing, my tiny legs wobbling, on top of the dark oak chairs and watching with unmasked glee as my grandpa kneads the dough carefully, his old and cracked palms expertly maneuvering them into perfectly round circles caked in flour. The sunlight pouring through the windows makes every grain twinkle like freshly fallen snow.

“What are you making?” I ask.

“Baozi,” is my grandpa’s quiet reply. Steamed meat buns. His eyes are focused, his hands gentle yet purposeful as he presses expert fingers against the dough.

“爷爷,” I whisper, my voice tight with awe, “Can you teach me?” My grandpa laughs, pausing for a moment to dust his hands on his apron. The apron itself resembles an American flag in some way – blue stars, pale red, and white stripes. I remember that I didn’t like it — that it didn’t fit him and the gentle curve of his smile, and the blue was an ugly contrast to his baby blue irises.

“Come here,” he instructs. With strong fingers, he gently wraps my small hands around the rolling pin and teaches me how to roll the dough. The dough sticks, devastatingly, to the rolling pin each time I attempt to slide it across the board. A pout forms on my lips — even then, I didn’t like the feeling of failure. But he didn’t quite mind, and I found that I didn’t either. He’d just laugh, shake his head, and extract the rolling pin from my hands.

“Here, like this.” And he shows me, step by step, how to get them into perfect circles and how to scoop in the filling, savory pork filling with chives and other vegetables. The baozi began to really take shape then, circular dough wrapped around small balls of filling into a plump onion shape. It smells of hearty oils and the sharp tang of cooked scallions.

“This is where the magic happens,” he whispers. The baozi are placed into baskets, stacked one on top of the other in a never-ending toppling tower of golden meat.

Twenty minutes later, there’s a fluffy and hefty bun in each hand, and I giggle with glee as I watch the steam curl from the tops of the puckered lips of the buns. They shine, brilliantly, like gold to me. The bun itself has always been my favorite part — the beautiful off-white color, the spring of the dough, and the chewy gummy feeling as I pull at it with my teeth. The filling is warm and it sits comfortably in my stomach, steeping with warmth and love.

My grandpa holds a bun in his palms, offering it to me with a fond smile. “What do you think?” he asks in broken English.

“I’m happy I can eat all this yummy Chinese food,” I say, honest in the way five-year-olds are.

My grandpa laughs, a loud ringing sound. “I’ll bring you to China with me one day soon, and you can get a taste of the real deal.” I want to tell him that this is the real deal, that being here, eating his buns so filled with love, is all I’ll ever need.

But I go to sleep that night dreaming of sparkling aqua seas and a country filled with people that look like me. I dream of a place that smells like home.

At six I venture across the seas for the first time, staring in wonder at the towering colorful arches that welcome me with blazing smiles. My grandpa holds my hand as we twist through the marketplaces, the words falling from his lips light like they have wings. He tells me stories of his youth in his low rumbling voice, pointing out small flashes of memories from his childhood.

He takes me to a baozi house, his eyes alight with glee as stacks of golden buns are placed before us, washing our faces with curling steam. “This is what authentic baozi tastes like,” he gushes around a mouthful of glistening meat. I smile at him, swallowing my own bite. The flavor of it lingers on my tongue, rich and sweet.

I want to tell him that his buns are even sweeter, that these buns are delicious but they’re lacking something. Something like love.

I can’t help but think as we pass through the bustling streets, watching him so alive, filled with youth and his eyes blazing with the type of belonging you only feel when you return home, your true home, for a long time. I can’t help but think that he’s so much happier here, where his words flow freely from his lips, unobstructed by the constraints of the English language. I realize then, that he has no real reason to struggle daily, testing unfamiliar vowels against his tongue. No real reason, except to be able to talk to me in both Chinese and English.

We return to the Americas and it feels like I’m supposed to have found something, but I only feel more lost, losing my grasp on strings that won’t untangle themselves.

At seven I learn to blend in, learn to swallow my tongue, and let my words fall silently against the soaking earth.

As we crowd together on the playground, a girl turns towards me, her mouth opening and it’s clear she has a question as her eyes drag over my features. “Why are your eyes so small?” she asks finally, and everyone around us grows silent. She stares at me, expectant and a little impatient. There’s a null rushing noise in my ears as I curl into myself. I stare back, at her hands, pale as milk, soft and pretty. I look down at my own, tainted yellow. My voice dies in my throat and I’m speechless.

A teacher yells something, and the buzz of the playground slowly resumes like nothing had happened. The girl turns away from me, boredom flashing in her eyes and a scowl on her lips. I stay paralyzed where I stand, still staring at my hands.

For the first time, I am ashamed. For the first time, I am overcome with a bitter longing to be someone else. Someone with golden hair and stars in their eyes, someone who fits in. The children loop their arms around mine and my feet drag against the blacktop, carving a threaded line on the loosely packed clay soils. It makes more of a mark than I ever will.

At eight, my mother asks me when my skin had become so dark.“No daughter of mine should have this tan,” she says, poking at my arm. “You need to be more conscious of yourself and how you present yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. My words are lost, falling against deafened ears. I stare at my hands again, at my nails bitten down to their beds, and wonder when I had become so flawed.

And so – I become so very conscious, my eyes lingering on smooth expanses of pale pale skin, of bright doe eyes and golden hair. Like this, the cycle starts. Like this, I feel myself distancing myself from my culture, throwing away bits of myself until I can barely recognize the girl that stares back at me in mirrors and shiny reflective surfaces. I begin to lose myself in this game of imitation, of pretending until I can almost believe that I’ve become what I crave to be.

I lose sight of the sun, and I lose myself in this game of make-believe.

At nine, my grandpa asks me when I had lost my happiness. “You don’t speak to me anymore. Your eyes are sad, always. Why?” He asks the question in his slow, broken English, staring at me with a face so filled with expectations and hope. Bitter annoyance claws up my throat and I turn away. Part of me wants to scream, to tell him to just speak Chinese, to stop torturing himself to speak English just for me.

The other part of me freezes when I realize that even if he did, I wouldn’t be able to understand his words now. The Chinese language, the one that had graced my tongue so easily before…it escapes from me now like trickling water through the cracks of my hands. The realization hits like ice water to a stinging wound, and I say nothing and try not to break as the sound of his slow footsteps eventually fades.

That night, my grandpa makes me baozi. I turn him down and tell him that the filling has staled in my mouth after years of the same taste, and close my eyes so that I don’t have to see the crestfallen expression on his face.

I tell myself that I’m unlovable.

At ten, it leaves me – finally, and fully. The language that used to taste like saccharine tangerines and warm soaking honey on my tongue burns like acid on my lips now, foreign and laced with unfamiliarity. It rings loud and ugly in my ears, and I tell myself that this isn’t what it’s supposed to sound like. This isn’t the beauty of the language that burns me now from within. So I close my lips and vow to never speak it again.

The language dies fully then, hidden in the depths of a treasure chest that I had long since lost the key of.

At eleven, I feel like I’ve failed my identity, lost every bit of what had made me human, had made me unique. I float helplessly, without an anchor to tie me down, without anyone to tell me who I am or who I should become, or who I was. This is the story of someone who lets go too easily, I realize.

I want to learn to love again, want to learn how to piece myself together again and hug myself tight so that I am whole.

I want to try again, but a hissing voice inside of me tells me that it is far too late, that I’ve abandoned myself for too long, let myself lose too much – I listen to the voice, and I sink like this.

At thirteen, I leave. Leave home, abandon all that I have ever known, and cross the threshold to the grand halls of a new home – boarding school.

Maybe this is my chance, I think as the acceptance letter wrinkles in my hands. The “Congratulations” is printed in bold at the top and it feels like hope, it feels like finality and a new beginning all at once. I tell myself that this is my chance to find myself, I allow myself to lose my grounding in reality for a moment and dream in the stars again.

So I leave, expectations crushing on my chest and my breath caught in my throat and for the first time, I see so many people that look like me, gorgeous people with long black hair and glowing olive skin, smiling and laughing with their families as they bid them goodbye.

It is here that my eyes open to the beautiful diversity of human life – people from every corner of the globe, all together here within the same buildings, eating the same food, sharing their own pieces of themselves with each other, and keeping bits of others with them too.

I meet people that come from across the seas, from the country that I hadn’t stepped foot in since I was six years old. Their voices are filled with joy as they speak in their mother tongue, their words so beautiful that it aches, that the chest that I had locked so deeply inside of me fills again with longing and threatens to burst open.

They ask me if I know any Chinese, tell me that they’d love to have someone to speak with, stare at me with hope and familiarity that I don’t deserve. I shake my head no, and they never ask again.

It’s easier, too, to lose contact with my family. To pretend that I haven’t seen their calls, to tell them that I’m busy and stressed, and—eventually though, everyone finds themselves drawn back to their roots, to the place that is home. I give in, weak and lonely and aching for familiarity.

“You’ve never tried to call us,” my mother hisses. It’s the first time in three months that I’ve tried reaching out.

“I’m coming home soon,” I say simply. The exhaustion envelops me like a sprawling weight and I let it seep into my words, let my voice waver for a moment before I’m silent. I stare at the stroked paintings behind my mother’s pixelated features, at the swans and pastel bridges and fading mountains that are so often captured in Chinese paintings. Longing fills my chest, coats my lungs, and twists bitterly in my gut and I turn away. I’d lost the right to feel like this, to want like this, long ago when I had let my own language die in my throat three years ago.

“Your grandpa misses you,” my mother says after a moment. I look up, staring at her through the screen. The overwhelming guilt washes over me like crashing salt waves and I duck my head, unable to maintain eye contact.

“Is he well?” I ask finally. And there, in that moment, something gives in my mother’s eyes – a small flicker of sadness, and fear overtakes me until I feel like a string about to snap.

“He’s-he’s starting to forget things.”

That night, I stare at the ceiling with her words ramming against my skull over and over again.

“Come home soon, before he forgets you entirely.”

At thirteen, I learn what it’s like to be afraid of your own family. Of being afraid of those you love, of the terror that fills me when I step foot on ground that is unfamiliar and too familiar all at once. To be afraid of your own roots, to press your hands against your abdomen and clutch blindly at the chest that’s still there after so many years, its lid begging to be freed and filled with scraping cobwebs and the burning taste of shame.

I see him when I step off the boat. I see the way his features alight when he catches sight of me, the wrinkles on his cheeks drawing tight into a small smile. For a moment we stand there, the flurry of winter’s first snow gently swirling around our figures. For a moment I am paralyzed by a potent fear of rejection, of being unloved. We stare at each other, so many unspoken words between us but suddenly I’m rendered speechless, my mouth open but only silence coming out.

“You’re back,” he says finally. “How are you?” My heart aches at the familiar voice, filled with endearment. I glance up at him, at his oh so familiar blue irises, the kindness and patience that has always lived there — and the English sounds so wrong now from his lips, not when I’ve seen the joy of the man with feathered words flying from his lips, surrounded by choruses of vendors and the smell of chili oil hitting black coals. The cold seeps through the warm padding of my winter coat but in this moment—

At this moment, everything is clear. The chest opens on its own, blushing and beautiful and I feel…whole again.

I reach forwards and embrace him. ”爷爷,” I whisper. “我想吃包子.” I want to eat baozi.

 

Isabella Wu is a junior at Choate Rosemary Hall who loves to read novels, write short stories and poems, create art, and play music. In her writing, she aims to authentically convey her experiences and connect with readers through themes such as identity, love, regret, joy and more. Her work has been recognized by several National Gold Medals and the American Voices Award by Scholastic Art and Writing.

Visual art by Sofia Montelibano 

 

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A Nobody by Gia George

I was eleven years old on my first ballet lesson. I can still remember pressing my nose to the cool glass of the car window, waiting for the imposing white structure of the academy to glide into view. My mother was prattling on at the wheel, telling me about how she used to just love ballet, how it would make me graceful, how someday I’d become a celebrated dancer and perform on majestic stages in glamourous cities before spellbound crowds. I’d stopped listening for a long time, but she didn’t seem to mind. I just leaned my head against the window and let her lilting, fervent tones carry me away. At my young age, I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that rankled me about my mother’s chatter. It wasn’t that I was nervous, really, or reluctant to go. It was only until many years passed that I realised. It was that everything my mother had said, the way she’d said it, reeked of self-regard. Selfishness. She didn’t want me to go to ballet because it would be a fun extracurricular, or because she wanted me to learn a skill. She wanted to vicariously experience it all for herself.

The thing was, I’d never been a child who did or was anything. While other children screeched and tore around the house, I pottered about alone in the garden, seemingly at one with the silence, apparently completely content. While the girls in my class joined ice-skating or gymnastics teams, or learnt to sew from their grandmother, or played wild games of Tag in the playground, I stayed as silent and meek as ever. The only times I opened my mouth was if I ever needed anything, and I rarely ever did.

It unnerved my mother. She had grown up sprightly and healthy and completely happy, and it worried her to see the seeming lack of spirit in me. The lack of anything in me. I was an average student at best, prone to fits of daydreams. I had friends at school (who were really only loose acquaintances) but only because I was content to do anything they asked of me. Worst of all, I was terrible at every single hobby she tried to push me into- first it was the piano, then horse-riding, piano again, then acting, of all things, (that was an indubitable fiasco). After each attempt failed, after hundreds of pounds spent for months on another activity I showed no signs of interest or improvement in, my mother’s face would pinch like a clenched fist whenever she looked at me. She would almost snap on the rare occasions I asked her anything. Sensing danger, I would withdraw even further into my little world.

Now, sometimes I find it hard to fault my mother. She expected mothering a daughter to be tying ponytails, and trying dresses, the euphoria of childish hugs, and the responsibility of wiping away precocious tears. What she got shocked her, I think. It certainly removed the rose-coloured glasses from her eyes. She wanted to look at my youthful face, and see a promising child, a child who’d go on to make her proud. A future architect, teacher, leader, lawyer, mother. Instead, what she got was a child she could understand no more than if I’d been on the moon. And when you feel such a deep, all- consuming dissatisfaction with your child, they will know, inevitably. Subconsciously, I think I always feared my mother’s disapproval. And so I withdrew.

I understand that she felt that I was inadequate, mediocre, and my mediocrity made her inadequate. As a mother, as a thirty-seven-year-old whose achievements were now over and irrelevant. In fact, I sometimes think that she’d rather I were stupid, or arrogant, or a plainly unpleasant spoiled brat. Anything other than the way I just existed. At least she’d have something to show. Now her child was who people saw when they saw her. I was a representative of her, an ambassador, without even realising it. And I clearly wasn’t meeting the mark. That was what led to the ballet. My mother still had some lingering hope left for me, and so she rambled on at the wheel. 

Although I was vaguely aware of my mother’s frustrations, the full situation was far too nuanced for my mind to grasp until years later. My annoyance didn’t last long, and there was no resentment in my heart as we walked to the academy after parking the car. And my memories of that first ballet lesson are certainly not unpleasant. I remember a tall, angular woman with impeccably smooth skin and a very pink, lipsticked mouth meeting us at the door. She wore a black leotard with dance tights and greeted my mother with a bony hand and me with a cool smile. I felt very small under her gaze, unconsciously straightening my posture. Her eyes pierced like needles as she looked at me from that great height, as though she was sizing me up, assessing my value. She introduced herself as Madame Martin, leading dance instructor at the academy. With the natural instinct of a child, I knew from a glance that this wasn’t a woman to be messed with.

Madame Martin led me through a narrow corridor, and then opened a door and prodded me to enter. The intense white light dazzled my eyes as I stepped in. Blinking rapidly, the room swam into my vision, and I was stunned by the display that I saw. 

Tall, willowy, swans of girls in fluffy tutus were swooping across the wide practice floor, pirouetting, spinning, leaping. It made me dizzy to watch. Their feet flew with easy elegance, their hands floated with a gentle grace, all in perfect harmony with each other. If they were tiring, you would never have been able to guess it by their radiant smiles and starry eyes. With each step, their tightly laced ballet shoes pounded the floor in perfect unison, creating a perfect beat of their own over the fluting violin piece. Those that were not dancing were stretching their slender legs over their heads in front of the long mirror. I could see the supple muscle rippling like water under the skin. The whole room was a lively flutter of femininity, all soft skin and sweet smells and hairspray. Through my transfixed eyes, everything shone with a pure glow that seemed natural and right. Like dewdrops shining in morning sunlight.

Looking back on this memory, preserved perfectly and dreamily in the front of my mind, I think I had had an epiphany of some sort. For the first time in my eleven years of life, I wanted to be someone. With all the strength in my little heart and from the marrow of my bones. And for the first time, at eleven years old, I realised just how small, how insignificant, how utterly unsatisfactory I was.

I felt like my heart would stop beating when I thought about learning in front of them. I’d stumble about like a fool. Would they all glare at me, at this odd, small child who dared join their ranks? Would they laugh, looking down from the lofty heights of superiority? 

The feeling didn’t last long. After letting me watch for a minute or so, Madame Martin pulled me out of the room. She must have read the expression on my face and guessed at my thoughts. In a surprisingly gentle tone, she explained that I would be in the beginner’s class, that those girls were training to be professionals. “If you work hard and practise,” she told me gravely, “you might make it too.”

And I did. My whole life now revolved around the dance. Even throughout the week, ballet was constantly at the back of my mind- at school, I would absently dance the steps in my head, try to recall the technique. Madame Martin’s words echoed in my mind. “If I work hard…”

Every morning and every night, I would do my stretches in my room, feeling fierce satisfaction as I steadily got more flexible. Whenever Monday drew nearer, it would become almost obsessive. I threw myself into all the classes with a passion. With every mistake, every slip-up, my legs would turn to water, my throat constricting. I’d flash a guilty look at Madame Martin, searching her eyes for disappointment. But all the errors did was make me more determined. I shone amidst the other girls- and I knew it. Before long, I could dance any piece flawlessly without any hesitation. I moved up two grades in what seemed like no time at all. Sometimes, I’d look up and see a fleeting glimmer of pride in Madame Martin’s usually cold eyes. Inwardly, a shiver of glee would run up my spine.

My zeal was not for the girls at school, or Madame Martin, or even my mother (who was, of course, delighted beyond words). It was for me. I could never go back to being who I was. I was on a journey now, a journey that I was determined would end in the room with those beautiful dancing girls I’d seen my very first lesson. A journey from Nobody to Somebody. I was certain of one thing- I would never let myself be Nobody again.

Gia George is a 14 year old writer from Chelmsford, England. She’s been writing ever since she can remember. If you’re reading this, she’s probably at school, doing homework, writing, or reading.

Artwork by Anastasia James

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Scenery by Blanka Pillár

I forgive him for the little lies. The little fibs that slip away and the broken promises that go unkept. He always tells the same lies, and sometimes I believe him, because the story paints itself like a vivid oil portrait; first the figures are painted, then the background, then the corners, edges, contours, and finally it becomes as if it were a real scene on the canvas of life, but only the immensity of human imagination has made believable what could never be real. It tells me what I most desire, and so I reach for it with all my heart, stretching out the arms of my soul to preserve all that its lips say, and to hold it within me for eternity. I love him with all my heart, but when my reality is keen-eyed, it sometimes smells like the scratch of jagged-edged infidelities in the dawning dawn or the wistful night. The cold realisation slips into bed beside me, or touches me as I walk.

Today we take it into our heads to walk around the riverbank. We get caught in the cool January breeze and he starts coughing. I take off my thin pink cotton scarf and wrap it around his neck with careful movements. He gives me a weak half smile and walks on. My chest gets hot, even though my whole body is shivering from the winter’s minus temperatures. Sometimes we stop. We look at the broken-legged seagulls on the slippery waterfront stones, the sloppy sidewalk ahead, the footprints of giddy pedestrians. As we spy one of the old buildings covered in melted snow, he rubs his hand. His fingertips are almost purple, so I tug off my black fabric gloves and slip them on his frosty palms. He thanks me quietly. His silent words creep into my consciousness like angelically soft notes, wrapping my trembling body in a gentle embrace.

Barely perceptible, the milky-white sky opens and it begins to drizzle, but we are unperturbed. We sit down on a stinging bench and stare silently at the glistening toes of our wet boots as they tread the snowy ground before us. Somewhere in the distance, expensive hand-painted china plates clink, light pages of newspapers crinkle in the city breeze, the iron bells of a dilapidated church jingle, a delicious golden-skinned duck roast in a warm oven is being prepared. I feel him move beside me, and I put my head down. He sways back and forth with folded arms, while tiny particles of dripping snow fall on his knitted flame-red angora sweater. I slip my thin arms out of my expensive loden-lined coat and place them on his back. He looks me in the eye. At the sight of his delicately delineated perfect face, my tongue curls and confesses. It humbly confesses the truth it has admitted so many times before, and hopes. It hopes that for once its love’s answer will not be a lie. But once again he replies, I love you too. I-love-you. He utters each elaborate detail of the gracious lie in a wordy way. The first syllable is trust, the second is passion, and the third is loyalty. He feels none of these, yet he testifies to them. He savours the shape of the voice. First bitter, then sour, then finally swallowed. After all, it’s only one word. But for me, it’s so much more: I put myself in his hands.

Maybe that’s not how it all happened. I’ve been sick for a while now; my lungs are weak from the January freeze. Every time I close my eyes, I try to remember our last story. Embellish it, add to it, rearrange it, change it. Maybe one day I’ll grind it to perfection and that word won’t ring so false. Or the memory will turn yellow, like old letterhead, and no longer matter. Or maybe ‘‘I love you’’ will become just another fluffy word to be whispered in the harsh winter, bored, picked up by the wind, carried far away, across the world, to where it means nothing. Far from the eager, greedy arms of my soul.

Blanka Pillár is a young, emerging writer from Budapest, Hungary. She has a never-ending love for creating and an ever-lasting passion for learning. She has won several national competitions and is also a columnist for her high school’s prestigious newspaper. 

Artwork by Devika Aggarwal

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The Symbolism behind Driving into an Underpass on the Garden State Parkway

One time, while driving home from a Tuesday grocery trip at the Little India produce market, you wiped the last fragment of boiled spaghetti away from your lips with a Chipotle napkin and said that only things that bluntly resemble the form of humans can have symbolism. Take the trees, you said, and see how their branches jut out like frozen twizzlers from the lean figure-eight waist — it all looks distinctly like the silhouette of a human body. This is why there are so many poems littered with metaphors about trees. And look ahead at the chipped brick underpass, you said, there is no symbolism in this thing, no blunt resemblance to humankind, just a loaf of carved brick designed to spare our Chevy truck from the humming Jersey rain for a few seconds. Pay no heed to the underpass, pay heed to the trees, you said. 

Now I don’t understand what this Garden State underpass has done to you to be named the most un-symbolic thing on the planet, but, then again, I don’t get a lot of things. For example, how did we two people, one a believer and the other an atheist, find ourselves together in the midst of a wedding. We announced our commitment to each other somewhere in the local mango fields, property of a fruit farmer who was not invited to our ceremony. I did not fancy stealing another man’s oxygen and trespassing like this, but you said that it did no harm, and so we exchanged rings on another man’s property unbeknownst to that man. 

The mangoes of the tree we stood under decorated the tufts of leaves like hairpins and your soft fingers did not hesitate to plunder a fruit from this tree for your lips to bite into, water syrup forming rivers through the lace of your gentle fingers like poetry. I was stunned when you did this. The fruit, mango, was nothing more than a complicated collection of particles to you, but I saw clearly that it was a child of the tree and the property of a man we both didn’t know. In the taxi your brother paid for, I pressed you for a reason as to why plundering the forbidden fruit was the arch for sharing my life with you and you said that it was just a mango, that it didn’t matter, that we shouldn’t fight on our wedding day. 

But our first night together, we fought anyway, this time with pieces of hips and elbows for the first right to the bathroom sink and, in the end, we had to share, like children. In between toothbrushes and shaving cream, with mouth foaming with listerine, dental floss, and toothpaste, I turned to you and said that I would love to be a liquefied mango, or any fruit for that matter, because it would be nice to be able to just disappear down the sink drain sometimes. Except, the part about being a liquefied mango is important because it would be quite horrid to flow down the drain like regular bathroom water. And you spat out a puddle of Colgate toothpaste into the sink and told me that you didn’t understand how mangos could possibly matter. I must have looked crazed to you, defending an eaten mango and then announcing that I want to be a liquified mango. But I didn’t want to tire you with my theory about the universe so what I said, instead, is that I guess what I mean is that I want an overripe mango for breakfast. 

Then dawned the days when you used to bike to Chinatown every morning, through dim sum palaces and dumpling dens, to buy a pound of fresh mangos for me, wearing nothing but husky trousers and that oversized gray Santa Cruz hoodie you once left on the couch and missed a flight to retrieve. And even though you never bothered to fix that brake lever, even New York City traffic didn’t keep you from your bike. Thinking of you one day as you had gone, I came to the conclusion that your Santa Cruz hoodie and your bike spend more time together than your lungs do with air. I wondered what a love letter from your Santa Cruz hoodie to your bicycle would sound like, maybe something like this: 

 

     Dear Bob the bicycle, 

I fell in love with the perfect curves of your tires that carry your full lust. I can fit into any space you allow me to. I wish for our dust to dance together like charcoal at the end of each day, when you’ve tired yourself and return from the dirt and grime of the winding streets.

Love, 

Your Santa Cruz hoodie 

 

I thought the love letter was quite clever, but when I gave it to you, you said that I have this unsettling tendency to pay attention to things that don’t matter, like bicycles, sweatshirts, and pigeons. Stealing a mango from a plastic grocery bag, you said that the rooster windbreaker with a missing “W” and the Chinese minimalists shopping for vegan tofu in China Town don’t matter in the grand scheme of life and the universe. So the next morning, I really tried to not think of the symbolism behind your tongue pushing water through the tube of your throat after 59 push-ups in the foyer, or the meaning behind a person who cuts an apple pie with the knife tilted up at 90, instead of a flat 180 degrees angle, or the symbolism behind the strange way in which you eat spaghetti and meatballs because you, My Lord, are the only living being who can get drunk off of dipping spaghetti, like nachos, into a tomato sauce with eggplant and zucchini. Now the truth of the matter is that I tried to pay no heed to the underlying symbolism of things for about two days, before rolling over and accepting defeat and the fact that cheesecake somehow represents the birth of a child. (A cheesecake is heavy and burdensome on the stomach, buttery, satisfying like the feeling one has after birthing a newborn, but touch the crust, and it crumbles to reveal a world of sin.) 

But you never got how these things could possibly matter because you never cared about the mango from the tree that did not belong to you, or the rooster windbreaker with the missing “W,” or the Chinese minimalists. You don’t remember the three people who always stood leaning on the tar hill cascading around the price pole for diesel in that gas station that bordered our flat. You don’t remember what the moon looked like, crescent or full, that night we built a cardboard airplane out of the cereal boxes in our pantry. That night, I told you that the reason our marriage collapsed was because of the mango and you laughed and asked again how mangos could possibly matter. The truth is that if you had cared about the mango, then the walls of the world would have leaned closer to you, given pieces of itself to you, and held you like honey with the gentlest of arms and lips. 

But the world and its things obviously never mattered to My Lord, you, who never hesitated to plunder and pluck the forbidden fruit and drink the soul of the mango leaves that were summoned to protect you and I, the paired pigeons, from the rest of the world. The people vomited sins and you spat back in the name of the holy Scripture. I am bitter. I wish that the fruit farmer had awoken our marriage night and thrown us both, like Adam and his beloved Eve, with the complementary threats and curses, to the cumbersome paved streets for drinking his property’s air. 

Now if we’re going back to the underpass, My Lord, there is lots of symbolism behind that Garden State underpass. The underpass broke the slaps of the rain as we drove underneath and somewhere in between, I grew up. That underpass is a symbol for our marriage, above all things. We drove Ferraris and Mercedes through each other as if we were somehow able to still stand even with an arching hole simmered through our pooling belly buttons. As we ate the fruits and beets, the things of this world fell from our throats through our bellies and out, though the difference is that I tasted it and you shoved it down your throat. You are like the underpass. You don’t stop to think about the cars and trunks that pass through you. You stand and assert your strength and courage by pushing something as gentle as rain away. The truth is that no one will care when that Garden State Parkway underpass is torn down one day and built into a better, stronger underpass, and the underpass knows that and maybe that’s why it’s so bitter. The underpass breathes, My Lord, just like the mangos breathe. The world beyond our bubble breathes, full inhales and exhales, drunk on the taste of air. It carries lessons and meaning and that’s why something as prosperous as mangos matter to the overarching scheme of the universe. 

 

Zoha Arif is a 16-year-old high school student studying computer science and programming at the Academy for Information Technology. She currently lives in New Jersey and enjoys spilling her strangest ideas into her works of fiction in her free time. She is also an editor for her school newspaper, Polyphony Lit, and E&GJ Press.

Visual arts by Ordy Chen

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Sunday Dinner

The family comes bubble wrapped, prepped to eat over synthetic discourse.
Prayer first. The future’s passed around; patrons pile on the collection
plate. The oven is hot and the timer cheats. Women leap at the beep,
unrehearsed in their assembled domestic burst. Another spring chicken:
underdone meat, dry like chalk. She’ll learn. The men are robust with
compensating promises, raises and grease simmering at the table, lingering
green outside the confession booth. They lurch. A bubble pops and the
curtain drops. Chairs adjust, scrape back singed skin. Faith and heat
converge.

Fiora Elbers-Tibbits
A senior creative writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

Art by Florence Liu

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