Eggplants

Vermicelli made from bean starch

Picked up with chopsticks, savoured

My taste buds report: it is mixed with

Eggplants cooked to a mush

Memories surface, of the first time we met

Conversation drifted, we chatted about eggplants

I remember you said you grew up in Taiwan 

Your dad was a Cantonese, your mum from Beijing

I forgot to ask how your folks cooked eggplants

Did you cook it first, leave to cool and dress it with sesame oil?

Eat it with a hot, fish-flavoured sauce? Or have it Cantonese style—

Stewed fish with eggplants, stewed chicken with eggplants?

Isn’t it amazing our thoughts all travel from food

To culture bonds, from reactions of the body and

Cravings of the palate to our relations with the world?

We travel non-stop, in the interval between

The lifting of one cooking lid and another, going after

The taste of fermented soya beans

Stopping by a pool of dried soy sauce

Studying the traces

In my old home, shabby but comfortable, I remember

Those plump eggplants mother bought

Placed right in the centre of the sitting room, like Buddha

To be revered. In time life turned chaotic, abroad, alone

I could never recapture that taste in my cooking 

With what mixed feelings, I wonder, your parents

Had followed the flux of emigrants and crossed the wide seas

Their vocabulary becoming infiltrated with hybrid fruit, new vegetables

Their tongues slowly getting used to foreign seasonings

Like many of their generation, everyone began to drift away

From a centre, their appearance changed. But now and then

From shreds of something here and bits of 

Something else there we discover a vaguely familiar taste

Like meat and skin cooked to a mush, gone apart

Back together again: that taste of ourselves, extinct, distinct

Translated by Martha Cheung. This poem appeared in Foodscape, published by Original Photograph Club, 1997. © Betty YY Ng