Patchwork dolls, p.4
Patchwork Dolls, page 4
harvest
Salt
Furu
Pepper
White wine vinegar
Fresh leaves are best, but if you are in a situation where that is not possible, you can use dried or preserved leaves. Rinse and rehydrate the leaves. There should be a variety of flavors and textures. Many people remove the curly tendrils that form at the base of the leaf, but I like to keep them, as they look rather pretty.
While the leaves are drying, prepare the vinaigrette by whisking a smudge of furu—not too much—with white wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper. The solution should emulsify and form a thick, fluffy dressing.
I like to serve the salad leaves undressed on a nice ceramic plate, with the furu vinaigrette in a glass saucer at the center. That way guests can dip as they please, or perhaps even eat the leaves plain, as they are wonderful and crisp on their own too.
Friya recited this recipe to me before she left. She was going to be reunited with her son. His father, she told me, had taken him across the world as a baby, and she had stayed to continue working for the revolution. Now the boy was ten years old, the revolution had failed, and Friya had been alone for a decade. She asked me if I wanted to join her. But I worried for your grandmother, who had yet to experience the constant uprooting that has come to mark my own life. I didn’t want to do that to her. I know how it feels to be legless, to not have even one seed to plant something, to use the last fibers of hope you have to start anew.
The period after Friya left was very bleak. It felt as if the entire city had transformed into a giant worm, and we were eating through the endless underground, unsure of when we could resurface. Your grandmother lived her entire childhood like that, and because of that there are resentments between us. I never felt confident enough to let her out by herself.
We left the city when she was eighteen, and through an acquaintance I heard about the nomads living in the forest. A lot had changed by then; there were no more cattle, no more dairy, and most of the land’s natural vegetation had been decimated by years of flash floods and fires. I taught the nomads about repeating, how to nurture the soil, how to find their own seeds, how to grow from nothing. Your grandmother and her partner adopted many of the children who needed new families. In this way, she raised a whole generation of people, who then raised another whole generation of children.
I always remember this time as the time of sweetness, of tiny shards of fading sunlight. In the summers, I would pick wild yellowberries with the youngest children, some just learning to walk, and together we would make a dessert that was very simple. We called them bedtime berries because they were always the last thing one ate in the day, so the sweet taste stayed with you all night when you were dreaming.
Bedtime Berries
Recipe
Wild berries
Mint
Rosewater
Sprinkle of sugar
Pick the berries when the sun is still warm. Clean and dry out on rocks. Place in a large bowl for sharing and pour rosewater, shredded mint, and sugar over the berries. You can eat this immediately or wait half an hour to an hour for the fruits to macerate and become even more sticky and sweet.
I must confess that I do not like desserts, but this dish is so straightforward, so direct in its innocence that I always ate it with the children, and it was almost every night that we ate this dish in the summer. In the winters, we stewed apples and made tea. We built houses. We made homes.
For twenty years we lived like that. But circumstances change quickly, and in a lifetime like mine you understand that nothing is permanent. We had seen revolutions. We saw wars. We knew of devastation.
The other day, we received news of the ceasefire being broken not far away. It was the morning of your grandmother’s wedding; she was already in her long silk dress. I was meant to help her with makeup, but instead she asked me to go out and see if the harvest was ready. Already four months pregnant with your mother, she had been producing the most generous of foods: flowers and fruits and nuts and leaves the size of dinner plates, fibrous and rich. She asked me if I had experienced the same, and I told her that the day I found out I was pregnant was the day a boy soldier from my village had drowned in the lake. A suicide, they had said, and all during the pregnancy, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I wondered what world I was bringing my daughter into, how we were being so much less of ourselves—so reduced in our want for the future, the tiny holes that perforated through the dark.
Your grandmother’s harvest fed us all that heavy night, and she served us in a cape I made out of fish skin. It shimmered like a pond in the moon, and I felt that it was too beautiful, too physical. Already we knew we had to move again, that there were soldiers coming our way, and I wasn’t sure if I would make it this time. My dear, great-granddaughter. I imagine this letter to be like an embrace buried quick in the dirt. I am writing to you because I know how the weight feels. Sometimes it appears even the mountains possess more lightness: From where they are, they can always see both the skies and the earth.
But there are ways to regenerate. Every harvest, save a jar for when you have to move to a place with no soil, no sunlight. Be smart with where you grow, how you reinvent yourself. Carry the people you lost with you. Find new soil when you need to; build a feast when you have to leave again.
HARVEST FOR THE EVE OF A DEPARTURE
Gather all your harvest; dig up all the roots. Go to the forest. Wash the harvest in spring water. Dry leaves in the midday sun. Start a fire in a small but deep pit. Make a cover out of wood. When the fire is steady and will not fade out on you, add in the harvest, some boughs of willow, lavender, thyme, wine. Roast with the cover on for a few hours. Sit in the smoke with your loved ones. Cut an inch off your hair and give it back to the earth. Thank the ancestors for giving you this food. Begin the feast when you are ready. Eat until you are done.
The Reader
Dear reader,
If you prefer to continue this story collection in the traditional way, please feel free to turn to the next story after this one.
If you’re up for a little adventure, however, please proceed to the next page.
You wake up one morning and it’s gone. There is a blankness inside of you: carved, scraped, dry. But you cannot name it. Everything looks the same. The unwashed cups on your bedside table, the puddle of clothes on the floor, the way the air conditioner spits a fungal mist. What is missing, you wonder? Is it your memory that has been erased? Or something else? You had heard of this happening: entire timelines wiped clean, people fading, even buildings disappearing.
You walk around your studio apartment, open some windows. It’s a Sunday; outside, you hear the beginnings of brunch hour, the rush of plates, people greeting each other. All this, familiar—yet you know something is missing.
You drink some very black coffee, eat some leftover cake from a party you don’t remember. The cake tastes odd; your tongue thrusts it heavily back out of your mouth. Mold. Pretty: round, stamped patterns of white. In the bathroom, you scrub your gums and the inside of your mouth until blood hits the sink enamel.
Cake from a party you don’t recall, cake that is already old. How old? You check the date, but you don’t feel anxious about the time. It is exactly the day you expect it to be. You go to check your journal for clues.
That’s what is missing. You don’t have your journal. In fact, you realize, you don’t have any books at all. In your entire 150-square-foot apartment, with the foldout sofa bed, the little wobbly table, the tap that worries you at night with its dripping, not a single one. You don’t even really remember what used to cram the areas above and below the television, what titles slept by your side every night. Now these shoddily constructed shelves are emptied, accented by only a few generic white candles.
No memory of books; no memory. You sit down. You don’t remember having read anything at all, not in your childhood or in your adult life, which makes you so anxious you begin to pull at the skin around your thumb. You have an essay to write; you remember that.
You remember that you were supposed to write about your home. You had pitched survival and resistance through literature. The essay is for a prestigious American magazine—this you remember, because when you visualize the deadline, a spike of dread enters your gut. Then you try to think of writers who have contributed to this publication. Surely it’s possible. But your mind blanks, refreshes, blanks again, in what you feel is an act of refusal or insolence. You check your phone. There are no ebooks, no saved articles, not even a single tab open. You search book and reading on all your messenger apps—nothing, not even a brief exchange with a friend. The essay is due tomorrow. You begin to breathe too quickly. How can you write, how can you even talk about survival, when you can’t remember what you’ve read?
You try to retrace some steps to figure out what to do next. The cake is a clue of time lapsed, you know that. You probably have some form of amnesia, so the most logical thing to do is to go to the doctor’s. But you are also someone who always slept with three or four books beside them in place of a warm body; every night as a child you turned pages under the covers, ruining your eyesight and your mother’s patience. You stole hours at bookstores in dirty, stuffed chairs; you dedicated your life to writing, to reading, to language. The gaps in your brain are like teeth falling out, in their place giant soft holes colored in Vantablack. You falter. Perhaps you can’t even function without your memory of literature.
But a small relief: So you do remember that you love to read. You can conjure scenes of reading; you just can’t remember what was read. This gives you the strength to take the next step.
If you’d like to go straight to the doctor, please turn to page 62.
If you’d like to find out where the cake came from, please turn to page 72.
If you want to try and look for your lost books, please turn to the next page.
The bins in the stairwell of your building are where you start, although you know you’re wasting your time. If someone—or you—took the time to remove every book from your apartment, surely it would be anticlimactic to simply dump them into these grimy pits.
As expected: no books. The bins are groaning with rubbish, grease-licked plastic containers and bottles and sweat that borders on citrus-sweet. Your tongue goes cold, remembering the mold. So much trash; how can anyone remove it all? It’s almost April. Soon the cockroaches will ascend from their holes and pipes, you think. You shake your head; the smell is making you dizzy.
You decide to get on some kind of public transportation, although you don’t know where to go yet. The lines for the bus stop outside your apartment building are colossal, packed with hikers and families and strollers. Not the bus. At the minibus stop, you see only a few people, but when you move closer to look at the sign, a woman with long silver sleeves huffs that she’s been waiting for forty minutes already. You could take the tram, your favorite mode of transportation, but you notice that the sun is already starting to melt down in the sky. And in the back of your mind, the essay, the essay.
The MTR then. Underground you go, stairs and escalators and tunnels, burrowing into the earth. Tiles and tiles and tiles. Everyone seems to be sagging, pulled down by bags and jackets and hair; no one looks you in the eye. When you sit down on the train, you notice that people are obsessively thumbing their smartphones. A man leans on the glass divider; from the other side, you see the crumpled xerox of his shoulders, his arms, the cloth bunching at his elbow. He isn’t asleep, but he looks unconscious, his eyes rolling side to side. An ad plays on the tiny LED bar above everybody’s heads. A slogan appears; it’s one you’ve read many times before.
The woman next to you suddenly drops her head on your shoulder.
“Sorry, sorry,” she says, horrified, waking up. Like everyone else on the train, her eyes are glazed, wet.
You wonder if you should ask if she’s all right. The carriage lumbers ahead. It is so quiet that you want to speak, just to know that sound is possible.
At that moment, your phone buzzes. It’s your friend L calling. L, you remember, reads as much as you do. You recall her flat full of books, spines of gold and green and red and black, just like yours.
The woman next to you readjusts her bag and looks ahead, making it clear that she will leave the train at the next stop. You feel like this is your only chance to ask her any questions you might have. Your phone continues to sing in your pocket. Above your heads, the slogan flashes again and again and again: PROTECT OUR HOME.
If you want to quickly ask the woman a question, please turn to page 77.
If you want to answer the phone call, please turn to the next page.
The voice of L has always soothed you. Perhaps it’s her accent, or the way she says your name, as if she’s so happy to be talking with you.
“I’m really glad you called,” you say. “Something weird is happening.” You turn to your right; the woman who fell asleep on your shoulder is already gone, and people are filing out of the carriage.
“Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that. Want to talk about it?”
“It’s a little difficult right now,” you say. You’ve always hated talking on public transportation. “I’m on the MTR. Can I message you about it in a bit?”
“Yeah, sure, of course. Oh, before I forget, the reason I’m calling is I wanted to buy a copy of the book you lent me. You bought it from Pickwick Books, right? I’m having trouble finding it.”
“Well,” you say. “I suppose I did.”
“Great, I’ll go buy my own. I hope they still have it. And am I still seeing you next week?”
“I think so? I mean, yes. Where are we meeting again?”
“You’re funny! I’ll see you then.”
You end the phone call with L. You feel strangely lonely. You wonder why. Then an urgent reminder flashes in your mind again: the essay.
You open up maps on your phone. You know where you need to go next. And you need to hurry.
Turn to the next page.
Frustratingly, your memories of specific bookstores are also erased; you can only remember one long, continuous experience of browsing, new book smells, your fingers growing damp and dusty. What was the unusual name that you just heard? You spend a few minutes scrolling online, looking up listing after listing. All of the stores are closed, permanently, except for the one that was just mentioned: Pickwick Books. It is all the way out in Kowloon.
You switch trains at the next station and continue the snaking journey across the harbor, cutting across districts you should know well, except now you have a hard time describing them. Chaotic, you think, busy. What else? Your vocabulary has been reduced to clichés.
You exit at your stop and scamper out onto the street like a mouse.
Mouse, mouse, you think—town mouse, country mouse. Where did you hear that story? Once upon a time, there was a mouse who lived in the country. He loved eating corn and lying all day in the flowers and fields. He wore a tiny brown hat and a tiny brown waistcoat and lived in a tiny brown shed. He was very content, but still, he wanted more. He wondered what it was like in the town nearby. Your mother must have told that story to you when you were small. There were other stories too, tales of babes in milk, of survival, of shadows between trees. Don’t be greedy, now; listen to your mother; don’t bargain with the witch; two chopsticks are stronger than one; each grain of rice will be a spot on your face; don’t lie, for the wolf will eat you. You remember a red hood, a girl floating in the water, homes made of straw and sticky biscuit. Was there a story about a pig? Did she go to the market to buy garlic, or did she build a house? Or perhaps she disappeared. I’ll huff and I’ll puff; I’ll cry all the way home. But why have you forsaken me? You are conflating tales with memories. You think back to the last concrete thing you saw. Protect our home. You hope it will not be the last thing you read.
Outside, the pavement is covered in a fine glaze; it is raining. You walk with no cover, darting around umbrella spikes and leaking awnings. You check your map every so often, watching yourself gliding erratically across the screen in a yellow dot. You’re a little lost; you retrace your footsteps a few times, rerouting across grassless parks and construction sites. By the time you reach the building, the sky has blackened. Your phone glows slickly. It is 5:51. The bookstore, according to the online listing, closes at 6:00.
Not far down the road, you see a small open doorway with steps that lead down to an arcade, framed in neon. It is a familiar sight—you recall hours spent there during long, restless summers fidgety with heat, the metallic coin smell permanently smudged on your hands, reminding you constantly of this other, underground life. You already hear the ping ping ping of balls skittering to a beat, feet scrambling to keep time, muted, alien gunshots. You and your two cousins running around, winning all the time, the red lollipop joysticks and buttons waxy with play.
Distractions. You look back toward the direction of the bookstore. It is now 5:55. Do you keep going forward, or do you go back to your old, underground haunt?
If you want to visit the bookstore, and feel you have enough time, please turn to page 58.
If you would like to go to the underground arcade, please turn to the next page.
If you decide to turn back and go home, please turn to page 76.
Inside, it is cold, and the stairs tunnel down into only colder worlds. The choruses—coins, winning, microwaved J-pop, hands slamming repeatedly on buttons—stream in and around you, drawing your body closer to the source of these interactions. It is disturbingly busy. Each machine is occupied by at least two people; at the popular games, four or five people, mostly male, hang off the sides, waiting with slippery, clear bags of coins or backing their bets. Simulated horses, fairies, zombies, safari lions, fish, women in military uniforms, mythological creatures, arrows and pulses, guns and batons, murderers and dancers. Bread and circuses. On the ceiling the games appear as hallucinogenic projections, blurred, crushed in a soft half-light, like the moving images by fire that cavepeople must have once seen.
