What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

were more than grateful for it. With other people you could begin from the beginning, together you could create your own forces, your own stories. Love was easier, it was unexpected, pure. Because it was unasked for, unsolicited, yes, unexpected. Like Carla. She loved Carla.

With her friends, Tuyen could be lavish. They took it as a gift. They took each other as gifts. They were marvellous each time they met, bringing each other messages from the realms of their families and poring over these messages like found jewels, turning them over in the hand and listening to the sounds of them as they clinked on each other. Now that they were older, the details of their families lives loosened on their tongues, becoming fantastic when they lay together on the ratty couch at Tuyen’s, examining them. This was Tuyen’s interpretation, at any rate.

Now, walking toward home with Carla, the uncomfortable feeling she’d had observing her father seemed already to belong to another world. The fear she felt—no, she would not call it fear—the presentiment she had now appeared as just another secret box for examination.

ELEVEN

THEY WERE ON THE STAIRCASE up to the apartments when they smelled the cooking coming from Carla’s place. “Oku!” they both said together. Oku was a great cook and he would often come to their place and cook elaborate meals from their scanty cupboards. They loved those visits, when he would throw together what to them were impossible ingredients and come up with sumptuous meals. They each had an aversion to cooking. Tuyen’s was easy enough to understand. Throughout her childhood she’d spent from four o’clock in the afternoon to midnight in a restaurant, falling asleep on the table to be awakened and taken home half walking, half dragged. She could count the days since her father acquired the restaurant that there had been a meal cooked at home. If they didn’t eat at the Saigon Pearl itself, they ate leftovers from the Saigon Pearl. Tuyen made every effort not to learn cooking and developed a dislike for what was called Vietnamese food.

“Why can’t we eat like normal people?” she used to ask when she was little; when she was sent to school with minty soups and bean curd.

“Don’t you see normal people coming here to eat, Tuyen? They like our food,” her father would point out, but Tuyen was never persuaded. She only felt exposed in the restaurant when European clientele were present, and when the customers were Vietnamese or Korean or African or South Asian, she hated, then, the sense of sameness or ease she was supposed to feel with them.

It took her years to admit to friends that her family owned a restaurant, and she was still not comfortable taking them there. Tuyen’s favourite food was potatoes, cooked any style, but mostly just plain boiled potatoes with butter. They were easy to cook, took no attention whatever, and to her taste they were the most delicious things. She could eat potatoes any time of day or night, huge bowlfuls. Potatoes were perfect, neutral, and glamorous. Meaning not at all like her family. And milk. She loved milk. Despite the fact that her stomach reacted violently to it. But she insisted on drinking it. Or now buying it at least. She thought of this violent response as something to be conquered, like learning a new and necessary language. If nothing else, her tiny fridge could be counted on for storing putrefied sour milk that she had not had the courage to consume.

Both their childhoods, Tuyen’s and Carla’s, had been of navigating different and sometimes opposed worlds. At every turn it had been treacherous. And food was the dead giveaway. On Saturdays Nadine, Carla’s stepmother, would take her to Kensington Market, where laden with bags Carla would wait and wait, her body in an impatient and resigned burning, as Nadine talked to the storekeepers, haggling an extra piece of fish, an extra lime, an extra pepper, mistrustful of the weighing of every item. Her stepmother’s happiness in contrast to her unhappiness and discomfort was most evident at the Saturday market. Carla stood waiting, her nose rejecting the smells, her throat gagging on rotten fish and rotten vegetables, her face turning away from the appalling blood stains on butchers’ aprons at European Meats, her whole being wishing to be elsewhere. Carla hated Nadine’s exotica. She was uneasy among the pawpaws, soursops, plantains, goat, fish, gizadas, and cans of ackees. “Your father likes this,” Nadine would croon. She’d taught herself how to cook Jamaican just for Derek. Carla despised the smell of the stores that carried dried cod and fresh thyme and mangoes. Her ears registered discomfort at the sound of accented voices pausing in self-derision, in boastfulness, or in religious certainty. She hated this language that she made herself unhear, unthink, and undream. She never actually learned it except to understand her father, Nadine, and their friends, and to translate it to her teachers and anyone official. She had been a translator herself, knowing a language the way a translator whose first tongue is another language knows. She did not live in it. She considered her father’s customs foreign, embarrassing oddities that she would try to distance herself from in public. Nadine would take her to the patty store, bestowing on her a patty in cocoa bread and a cola champagne as a treat. Carla stood uneasily eating while Nadine insisted that it tasted good. She found the floury depth of the two breads distasteful. The centre of meat and spices burned her and set her tongue on fire. The cola champagne added heat where she wanted coldness, water. So overwhelming was the whole market that the taste in her mouth was sweet and sickly at the same time. She vowed never to come here when she grew up.

So food was not their specialty, nor cooking. If not for the potatoes, which Tuyen shared freely with Carla and had in abundance, Carla would be bone