THE KITCHEN REEKED OF GARLIC. JOHN’S FINGERS WOULD smell of it for the rest of the day. Brennan, on a step stool to his left, worked on peeling the skin off her second clove, slowed by its sheath and paper sticking to her fingers. Hunter, on a chair to her left, made a show of picking at the tough shell of his clove whenever he thought John was looking at him. John peeled the rest of the head, placing the flat of his knife over each clove and smashing down with his fist to crack the sheath. In smashing the first few cloves, John demonstrated to the kids how to modulate the force, from a press light enough to crack the sheath without compromising the clove, to a blow hard enough to smash the garlic. The kids didn’t care.
John remembered his father showing him how to peel garlic in their tiny apartment, thick wooden cutting board larger than the Formica counter on which he worked, hands like a robot at some factory: garlic, knife, smash, clove to one side, sheath and skin to the other, repeat. In that old apartment, the light in the kitchen was dim—the window opened into a shaft. His father didn’t give him garlic to peel, maybe to save himself the aggravation that John suffered as Brennan dropped her freshly peeled clove on the floor and Hunter flicked his to spin on the counter. So John only watched until the day he needed to mince a clove of garlic for his own purposes, his own food.
John worked at half the speed of his father despite having nearly four times the space, a granite counter, and better light. The cutting board was the same size. John embraced this failing. It meant he wasn’t a kitchen worker like his father, fresh off the boat despite decades in this country. He glanced over at his children, their white features—Jane’s features—a badge of citizenship he’d never be able to obtain despite being born ten miles from the kitchen they stood in.
The head peeled, John swept the sheaths and paper into the trash.
“This is how you hold a knife.” John demonstrated the grip his father taught him, index finger and thumb on either side of the blade so it wouldn’t slip and to give him fine control of the cutting edge.
“When can I hold the knife?” Brennan asked.
“Do you want to hold it now?”
She reached for it.
“No!”
She had reached for the top of the blade, the only open space for her hand. Brennan jerked her hand back, and Hunter started and almost fell from the chair.
“Like this, reach for the handle,” John said, flipping the knife in his hand to present Brennan with the handle. “So you don’t cut yourself or me.”
Brennan took the knife. She placed the tip to the cutting board and adjusted her grip to mimic the one he demonstrated. The blade was longer than her forearm. John resisted every instinct to yank the knife out of her hand.
“Can I cut something?”
John pushed some garlic toward the knife. She positioned the knife and pressed down. The clove split.
“That was easy!” Despite the enthusiasm in her voice, Brennan placed the knife down gingerly and lifted her hand slowly, as if it were a snake that might recoil and strike her.
“Hunter?” John asked.
Hunter looked at the knife.
“Why are we even doing this?” Hunter asked.
“Because you need to learn how to cook.”
“We can learn when we’re older. When we can’t get hurt.”
John picked up the knife. “This isn’t a debate. Watch.”
“We’re watching, Daddy,” Brennan said. She had taken Hunter’s hand.
“I won’t be around forever to show you how to do this.”
John minced the garlic. He worked fast, but not as fast as his father, and as the pile of minced garlic grew, some of it sticking to the edges of the blade, some of it scattering, none of it matched the memories of the neat piles his father chopped.
“Come here.” John turned to the stove. He poured a thick layer of oil into the sauté pan and turned the burner on. Hunter dragged his chair over so he could stand on it. Brennan crowded in between them.
“Do you put the garlic in there?” Brennan asked.
“Not until it’s hot enough.”
He waited. The kids stood silently.
“What are we making?” Hunter asked.
“Sèungtao iu.” When was the last time he spoke Teochew? He hated that it sounded foreign to him.
“How do you say that?” Hunter asked.
John repeated the words, trying to capture his parents’ pronunciation the best he could. “Sèungtāo. Garlic. Iū. Oil.”
The children repeated the words. Their attempts amplified the American English that John could not get out of his own voice. As much as John resented people’s surprise that he spoke English with no accent (“You talk like an American!”), he hated himself for speaking Teochew like he was raised in America (“You talk like an American!”). As a kid, he was a foreigner when he left his house and when he came home.
“What’s it for?” Brennan asked.
“Anything. You put it on food, the same way you would with giạmchăi or bhātyōng.”
He could see that the kids didn’t remember what those things were. Why should they? Where had he been before his arrest, trial, acquittal? Working. He didn’t have time to cook—especially food that Jane tolerated, at best.
“We’re making it so we can put it on noodles later. Mị. Egg noodles.”
John scraped the minced garlic into the pan, and the oil sizzled around it. The timing was tricky. The garlic needed to be bronzed when it was done. Turn the heat off too early, it would be pale; too late, it would burn. The kitchen grew slightly smoky.
“It smells bad,” Hunter said.
John didn’t say anything. Maybe his kids would develop a taste for his food (his parents’ food) in time—muē, deudòu, guédiāo, chábẹung, būibūi bhāt, teung—all of it hójiāt. But he knew that they would feel less authentic than him and probably forget the names of the dishes he made for them before the taste left their mouths. After his parents died, John’s Teochew degraded over time like herbs left in a cabinet.
John turned the heat off.
“It’s still cooking,” Brennan said, on her tiptoes so she could look into the pan.
“Yes. Until the oil cools. Then we put it in a jar.”
“Is that it?” Hunter asked, ready to break their huddle, jump down from his chair, and leave.
“I’m trying to teach you something here.”
“I don’t want to learn. I don’t like it.”
“You haven’t even tried it.”
“It’s gross.”
John took the handle of the still-sizzling pan. He needed to—
#
—inhale.
John was in the middle of a two-hundred-page merger agreement trying to spot any tax issues raised by the contemplated structure when Jane got home from work. She kissed him on the forehead as she walked to the bathroom. The couch was on the way to everywhere in their old apartment. He had almost forgotten she was home when he heard the toilet flush, the sink run, and then Jane sat next to the one leg, crooked at the knee, that he had up on the couch. She still wore her work skirt, but her blouse was untucked.
“I have news.”
John didn’t look up. “Did you get your brief filed?”
“Yeah, but that’s not the news.”
“Okay?”
“I’m pregnant.”
John looked up from the agreement and blinked. It was like he stumbled onto a blank page in the middle of a book, reading a sentence and suddenly a vast emptiness. His lungs, his heart, everything was still.
He needed to breathe, and inhaled so deeply he thought his ribs might crack.
Pregnancy was a possibility. They’d fallen into a laissez-faire approach to birth control. At some point, she stopped taking the pill. They weren’t “trying” as much as they weren’t trying to stop it. But because they weren’t trying, at first they used condoms. One night, in the middle of messing around, John fumbled through the nightstand and came up with an empty box. Jane pulled him inside of her and said, “Just pull out.” They never replaced the condoms. A few months later, drunk, he mistimed the exit. The next time after that, as he grew close, Jane said, “Just this once.” It wasn’t just that once, though. After a few months without conceiving, they stopped thinking about it and finished however the moment dictated.
“That’s amazing,” he said, because he knew he should say something positive. He leaned forward, and they hugged awkwardly, him folded over his left leg on the couch, her bending sideways to receive the hug. John sat back and waited for Jane to say something else, but she stared at her hands folded in her lap.
“You okay?” he asked.
Jane nodded, inscrutable.
“You didn’t tell me you thought—”
“I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” Jane said. “We’ve been trying for so long.”
John cocked his head but didn’t say anything.
“I was only a week late. So I held out another week.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know that I’m ready. You think, I’m a grown woman, I have a good education, we make good money. Lots of people with less have good kids. I must be ready. But…”
She shrugged and looked over at him.
“You’re going to be a great mother.”
“Thank you,” she said, blinking at some tears as she tilted her head back. John laughed.
“What?” she asked.
“It’s okay if your mascara runs. You’re home.”
Jane squeezed his leg just above the ankle. “I’m about to gain a lot of weight and get super hormonal. I don’t want you thinking I’m a mess already.”
“I love you, babe. You know I don’t care if you have runny makeup.”
“I’m going to go change.”
“I’m going to finish reading this,” John said, holding up the stack of paper.
“I’ll come out and sit with you.”
John turned back to the page. He blinked, but the text had lost all meaning. It was like reading Romeo and Juliet his freshman year of high school. He knew what most of the words meant, but they made no sense in their arrangement. He slogged through the next two pages, and when he looked up, Jane was on the other end of the couch.
“I couldn’t decide what to read,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Having trouble here, too.”
She shifted so her legs ran the length of the couch, resting right next to his hip. He started to rub them.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“I keep thinking of my father,” John said.
“What about him?”
“There was a day we had a fight. An argument. I was eleven or twelve. I don’t know what we were arguing about. But these things, they had a pattern. When I pissed him off, the angrier he’d get, the more I couldn’t understand him. The words. I couldn’t keep up with his Chinese. So I’d say, ‘Please speak English.’ And he, you know, he wanted me to be an American. Even when he was angry. Which was a lot of the time. So he’d try to yell at me in English. But his English was terrible. So I’d just, you know, talk circles around him. I thought I was so fucking smart, just talking circles around him. Which made him angrier. And I was so cocky about it. He wanted me to be American—I was really fucking American then, with this smirk. Like I was so much better than him because his English wasn’t very good.”
“I’ve seen that smirk. It cuts two ways. Sometimes it’s charming. Sometimes it’s infuriating. Sometimes both. You can be a real asshole about it.”
John nodded. “I knew what I was doing. He knew it, too. He wasn’t stupid. Anyway, the day I’m talking about, we’re standing in the kitchen, he was making tea, the kettle was just starting to whistle, and we’re arguing about something. So he loses it, slips back into Chinese. And I say, with that fucking smirk, ‘I can’t understand you.’ He grabbed the kettle and threw it.”
Jane’s eyes widened. “He threw it at you?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t know that he threw it at me. It was a small kitchen. If he was aiming for me, I think he would have hit me. Maybe he stopped himself at the last minute, so it missed.”
“What did you do?”
“I ducked. Then I yelled, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ The first time I ever cursed at him.”
“Jesus, John. You never told me this.”
“I don’t think about it much. He’s gone now. Who wants to think about that shit?”
“What happened?”
“He stood there. The look on his face. Like he had just woken up. It was surprise. And then he registered what he did, right? I can’t even describe it.”
In many ways, seeing the aftermath was worse than having the kettle thrown at him. His father’s face—flushed, eyes twitching underneath a nearly imperceptible crease in his brow—immediately wiped blank with a blink. Then his eyes darted about to piece together the kettle, scalding water running from its spout and top onto the floor, the divot in the wall from where it hit, maybe two feet from his son whose arms were cast wide, screaming an obscenity at him.
John realized, sitting on his couch telling Jane the story, that it wasn’t the “fuck” that had woken his father, it was the raw urgency of the question. It had not been rhetorical. What the fuck was he doing? His father hadn’t known despite the decision to do it. His father’s head dipped, but his eyes didn’t leave John’s. There was no panic or embarrassment or relief in them, but rather a fathomless loss that made John remember an older version of himself, standing at his father’s bedside holding his hand watching his chest rise and fall and rise and fall and waiting and then another rise and fall and waiting and waiting and a rise and a fall and then a waiting that never ended.
“I didn’t understand, at the time, why he looked like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like someone had died.”
Jane stretched out over him, coming to rest with her head on his chest.
“You don’t have to be like him,” she said.
John didn’t respond. She was wrong, of course. He was his father. And that afternoon, maybe the way his father looked at him wasn’t because John wouldn’t be able to look at his father the same way, but because his father knew that John would recognize that he was the same, that his father was the very air in his lungs, and not something that he could just—
#
—exhale. He wanted to swing the pan in his hand, casting a slick of oil that would calm the roiling ocean inside him—even if it burned them, scarred them, ate at their skin. He sucked in air, smoky with singed garlic. Still, the imperative to hammer away at the stove shook his hand enough to rattle the pan on the cooktop.
To his left, Brennan stepped off her stool and backed away, but Hunter stood his ground—an ember waiting for an accelerant.
The impulse to kick the chair out from underneath Hunter dragged at John’s foot like a receding wave. The kid thought he was safe up on his wobbly chair next to the scalding pan because it was in his father’s hand. But Hunter lived in a wreck perched on a rocky shoal, beset by a rampaging ocean. How could he know that children dwell in whatever frail emotional shelters their parents erect from the salvage left at the end of endless days? Brennan recognized the imminent collapse—she backed away, even reaching out to take her brother’s hand to pull him with her. But Hunter didn’t want to merely see the structure fall, he wanted to demolish it, so he yanked his hand from hers. The movement triggered John’s own hand, and it twitched upward before he arrested the motion.
Hunter stepped backward to avoid his father’s arm and off the seat. He grabbed at the back of the chair, bending at the waist to reach, catching it in his fingertips just long enough to stop his fall and bring his foot to the edge of the seat. But the momentum carrying him backward pulled two of the chair’s legs off the floor and overbalanced it. There was nothing left for Hunter to grab as the chair tipped over.
John dropped the pan and swung his right arm out to the side, catching Hunter’s shirt but punching him in the chest even as the pan, mostly upright, hit the stove with a metallic clap, splashing hot oil over the stove and onto John’s left arm. Instead of falling backward onto the tile floor, Hunter’s feet slipped off the chair, which snapped down onto its side. Hunter was too heavy for John to hold up, so he swung like a pendulum down and toward John, sweeping the fallen chair into Brennan and John. Hunter’s swing ended with the chair on its side pinned between him and his father, the edge of the seat jammed into Hunter’s belly. Brennan screamed as she grabbed her right leg. John let go of Hunter, who backed away, viscous tears hanging from his eyes like the beads of oil hanging from the dropped pan. John’s left arm burned where the sèungtāo iū had hit it.
Hunter looked up at his father and said, “I hate you.”
Brennan shouted, “You apologize, Hunter! He just saved you!”
Hunter looked between his father and sister, then ran from the kitchen.
John stepped over the chair to the sink and began running cold water. Welts rose already on his arm, red splotches like splashed paint, his rage trying to burst from his skin. Brennan waited for him to say something, but he kept his eyes fixed on his arm. She shuffled off as he stretched his arm underneath the faucet. The cold water poured over his burns, bringing a momentary relief, but the pain returned and lingered until he drank himself to sleep.