Kitchen Chaos (4 page)

“They are off, Mama,” I lie, tiptoeing to the stairs so I can run up to my room and grab my slippers. There's no fooling my mother, of course, no matter how often I try.

“I hear the clop, clop, clop like a horse,” she says, stepping into the hallway and waving a bamboo spatula at my feet. “Off!”

I do what she says and then dash upstairs for my slippers. Unlike the rest of the house, my room is a mess, but I find the slippers right where I left them this morning, one sticking out from under the comforter and the other in the laundry basket. When we moved, my parents let Katie and me get all new furniture and decorate our bedrooms ourselves. But even though I really like all of my new stuff, nothing about this place feels like “my room” or “my house”—at least not yet.

It's a decent-looking house, I guess, with four floors and gardens in the front and back. And Park Slope seems like an okay neighborhood. But
my
house is back home in San Francisco, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and a secret stairway right outside my bedroom leading down to the kitchen. My house is just up the street from my best friend, Sierra, and three blocks away from my cousin Chloe. My house is where I learned to walk and read and where everyone in the neighborhood came over for a big party every Chinese New Year.

Only the smells of our new place remind me of home. As soon as we moved to New York, my mother took Katie and me to Chinatown to find the shops that sell her favorite herbs and spices, lumpy vegetables and dried mushrooms, fish and other things that, trust me, you don't even want to know about. My mother is a biologist—she studies the way mice behave when you interrupt their sleep or blindfold them, that sort of thing—but cooking is her real passion. She's taking a year off from the lab because of the big move, and she can't be happy unless her kitchen is stocked with ingredients and at least two
pots are simmering on the stove. The boxes labeled
COOKWARE
were the first ones to be unpacked when we moved into our new house.

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.

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.