REVISED: 2022-09-19
My first memory from day before yesterday was of scorching my tongue on steaming oat milk foam. And, like somebody who needed to get some caffeine into their system, and like a complete dumbass, I continued sipping too.
It was one of those tongue burns that changes how you taste things for the rest of the day, and stung and tingled, even long after. For the rest of the night, I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth every so often, just to test if it would still feel strange and tender.
That evening, I went to make dinner. I had been thinking about making breakfast for dinner for the last two weeks, Chinese brunch style: congee (rice porridge), century egg, silken tofu. At long last, I was set on making it.
Someway, somehow, I walked away from the pot, and someway, somehow, forgot.
I came back to it after my suitemate called for me, and I found that the pot had bubbled over.
The thick, acrid stench of burnt food hung in the air. It was almost poisonously potent, even after I moved the pot to another burner, even after the windows were cracked open, even after I turned on the loud vent fans over the stove. I found out later that a dense layer of rice had burnt black onto the bottom of the pot, and no amount of scraping made even a dent in it. The pot was ruined, burnt beyond repair, and that smell followed me.
Because it was congee, that bitter wrong scent tainted the entire batch of rice. None of it was salvageable. It all went into the bin.
I went to bed that night, with a still-scorched tongue that I tested against the roof of my mouth, and the memory of that burnt-food odor.
The next day, I woke up, brushed my teeth, and walked into the kitchen to the burner once again.
My parents have told me that I was one of those babies that cried and cried. The only time I ever stopped crying was when I was held and rocked by somebody, or when I was taken outside.
I often feel like I’m not quite at place in this world. That things are a little bit off. And when I hear those stories of what I was like as a baby, it makes me think that even then, maybe especially then, the world simultaneously awed and tormented me.
I think it’s a miracle that I don’t get injured in the kitchen more often. I’m not only clumsy and have surprisingly terrible hand-eye coordination for somebody who paints so much, but I also find the minutiae of many kitchen tasks tedious and tiring, so I try to speed through a lot of them, sometimes carelessly.
It’s especially a miracle that I can count the times I’ve accidentally cut myself with a kitchen knife on one hand. The second time happened earlier this month and the wound is still recovering, a raised and sensitive line on the knuckle of my thumb. It was a deep cut – it took a second for my brain to realize the terrible pain was the result of my careless actions, and when I wrenched my hand away, I knew that I would pay for this mistake. It took a little bit for the blood to pool, but the stream of red was relentless once it started.
Over the next few days, my skin very delicately knit itself together. I remember one day, the knuckle of my thumb grazed the ridged edge of a zipper, and just like that, it seemed my body’s work was undone, and painfully bright red spilled out.
It took more time, but the skin over the cut is hard and raised now, tougher than the surrounding. I guess even our skin learns.
When I was a lot younger, I was scared of everything, and very anxious. Easily discouraged, in other words.
When I was a lot younger, I wanted to help cook – it’s one of the main things I saw my parents doing, when I had come back from pre-K, and my parents had come back from work. But my parents forbade me from doing so, putting a healthy fear of the kitchen into me that would follow me for another decade and a half – certainly longer than they intended to discourage me.
Looking back, I can see why – there’s a lot of danger in the kitchen. The same tools that we use to tenderize and dice the flesh of animals, the hot fire and spattering oil and heavy cleavers and gleaming knives, can also turn against us.
But the thing about the kitchen is that it’s an unflagging, unavoidable ritual. I return to it again and again. I’m not sure if that’s what growing up is.
This morning, I woke up with a nose bleed, a mild one, as far as nose bleeds go, I guess. I had stopped the bleeding, sitting on the toilet seat, feeling frustrated at how this had tied up my time.
At some point when I was eating dinner, it came back – or so I learned, when I caught my own reflection in the mirror and saw a smear of dark red on the tip of my nose. It had dried over and wouldn’t come off even when I wiped at it.
At the end of the night, I showered, and at last it washed off, along with everything else. I came away, gleaming from the water, bloodless.