edible ties
Posted at 20 Dec 5:48 pm. 0 comments
The balls of dough need to be handled firmly, but not too aggressively or gently. I’m rolling tong yuen, mini ones. This year we’re not adding red bean or sesame filling. I achieve some semblance of uniformity without too much extra effort and with a sprinkling of pride.
A head pops in the doorframe. “Wash your hands,” I order Phil. He’s six foot three gangly, compliant inches. He takes on the small ball of pink dough. “It’s your color.” He glares at me.
I declare my white balls stormtroopers. He declares his breast cancer. We form wedge and scissor formations with our doughy soldiers. I send in a spy. Our armies encroach on each others’ territory and suffer in the arctic snows of excess flour at the top of the tin baking dish. A particularly tiny ball of breast cancer is locked in an inescapable embrace with a stormtrooper. Two stormtroopers are infected with the enemy when Phil finishes and begins helping me roll the white with pink-tinted fingers.
Apparently, I am told after we finish with help from my grandmother, only good things should be said while rolling the tong yuen balls. Acceptable topics of conversation do not include wars and cancer and how much that roll of unshaped dough resembles a fat white maggot.
He appears again when we’re boiling the tong yuen. I call him over to watch as our handiwork is dropped individually into the pot and fished out into bowls of cool water when they float. The completed products will be divided into bowls and presented on the altars, then reheated and eaten. After the ceremony, after the joss sticks have been lit, the paper offerings burnt into the delicate lacy petals of a great ash-flower, I am pleased to see our unique half-pink-half-white baby has landed entirely by coincidence in Phil’s bowl.
Our relationship has been built thus far on food. I’d tried bonding with Lizzie first over shopping, not a topic I’m terribly interested in, and drinks and music at No Black Tie, which she isn’t terribly interested in. I couldn’t think of something I might have in common with my sixteen year old half-Aussie male cousin until my grandmother urged him to eat more for the umpteenth time at dinner one night.
“Stop smiling,” he told me.
“It’s so good to have someone else be the focus for once.”
“Your turn will come again soon,” he threatened.
During dinner at a Japanese restaurant I challenge him to eat the plate of green wasabi. “Halves,” he dares me back.
We eat the wasabi plain.
His eyes water. I have difficulty swallowing.
Having a brother, as far as I am concerned, must be awesome.
Even now, with my wrists still red after half an hour, my mind isn’t changed. He came up behind me, grabbed my wrists and tried to make me take the durian on the spoon. “You touch it, you eat it,” he said, and we wrestled. A foot hooked behind his knee did nothing. Stepping on his toes of iron did more damage to me than to him. I bumped his wrist against the box and exclaimed, “You eat the whole box!” but he wasn’t having any of it. We were still in the throes of a deathmatch when his father and sister came along and voiced concern. “Don’t be so rough with your cousin, Philip.”
Rough?
Communication comes in many forms; I’m happy with this one.
