Taste

My stomach still rumbles at the same hours three times a day my head spinning for my mother’s menu-- Like now coming home from class trying to get rid of Nietzsche on a shrinking belly. What matters we cannot deny: Chi, He, La, Sa-- eat, drink, shit and piss, the ancient philosophy mixed with rock n’ roll playing in the park. My mother was a lathe operator in a factory that employed ten- thousand people in Tanggu. She has the strongest hands almost ruined by the faucet water in the winter at an outdoor fountain where the mothers did the family’s laundry. I’m holding the rice bowl made by Tom, a humble ceramic artist who seems to know the color of a Chinese mother’s skin, and I see my mother again: Coming home on a bicycle in her uniform to bring us lunch-- the road was always dusty in Tanggu My brother and I would wait for her like two starving sparrows after school. Usually there were two dishes in two aluminum containers wrapped in white-and-blue hand towels & steamy rice in another. She watched us eat till the last bite then like she did everyday before returning to work cautioned me--the older one, to lock the door carefully. I taste now the being of my mother again and the dusty road of Tanggu. __LTG