My son Ali hustled ahead of me toward the front door of Fong and Company, the best Asian market in the District of Columbia.
“I think this will be fun,” Ali said, looking at me over his shoulder. “You know, kind of like that show I like. Weird Foods? I love that guy. He’s always eating the grossest things and makes it sound like he’s in heaven doing it.”
“Okay, what’s weird in this recipe?”
“Nothing. I don’t think. But there’s bound to be weird food in the store, right?”
He sounded so desperately hopeful that I laughed. “I’m sure we can find something weird if we look hard enough.”
Ali brightened and pushed into Fong’s, a sprawling, happy warren with narrow aisles and shelves stacked high with mysterious boxes that threw sweet and spicy smells into the air.
Ali went off through the maze, hunting. He pointed to several live tanks by the fish counter and said, “Okay, that’s weird.”
“Live crabs?”
“No, the eels,” he said, and he shivered. “I couldn’t eat those.”
I saw them slithering about in the tank next to the crabs and lobsters. “Yeah, I’m not big on eels either.”
“I’d eat just about anything else, though,” Ali said.
That lasted until he spotted a sign for Burmese peppers, five thousand degrees of heat.
“Okay, so I wouldn’t eat those either,” he said. “Why do some people like their food so hot that it makes them cry?”
“I don’t really know. Ask your grandfather.”
“Yeah, he’s always putting hot sauce on things.”
We found a nice clerk in her twenties named Pam Pan and showed her Song’s list of ingredients.
“Judging by the ingredients, those are going to be yummy rolls,” Pan said.
“Old Hong Kong family recipe,” Ali said.
“Really?” Pan said.
“My girlfriend-in-law’s grandmother’s recipe.”
“Your girlfriend-in-law?”
“My brother’s girlfriend,” Ali said, smiling. “Makes sense, right?”
The clerk laughed and looked at me. “Is he like this all the time?”
“Twenty-four/seven.”
Ali went on to prove it as the clerk took us around, peppering her with questions about the ingredients and whether there were any “really weird” foods in the store. He got a kick out of pickled chicken’s feet, which, to his credit, he tried.
The faces he made caused Pan and me to crack up, and I felt like we’d made a friend by the time she’d found every ingredient in the recipe. Ali and I left the market and called for an Uber to take us home.
“I like that place,” Ali said as we stood out on the sidewalk.
“I could see that, especially when you ate that chicken foot.”
“I did it.”
“You did it. With style, I might add.”
He liked that and gave me a hug. “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too, buddy,” I said, hugging him back. “Pickled chicken feet and all.”