Eden Onpeng

Author: Eden Onpeng

  • Not Yo Mamma’s Italian Cookbook: a review of Vegana Italiana by Tara Punzone

    Gone are the days where our only vegan pasta option is marinara!

    Vegan options at many Italian restaurants in my area are usually limited to pasta with marinara sauce without the cheese. I was glad to have a place at the table, but after ordering the same dish at every Italian restaurant, I was ready for some variety. Most Italian cookbooks from my library relied heavily on dairy cheese, so I looked online and found Tara Punzone’s cookbook, Vegana Italiana (written with Gene Stone), which offers over 100 recipes of veganized Italian cuisine. So far I have attempted the pasta dishes, sauces, and cheeses but Vegana Italiana also offers recipes on making pasta from scratch as well as salads, soups, first courses, second courses, and dessert.

    Tara Punzone is the owner and chef of Pura Vita, a vegan Italian restaurant in West Hollywood, California (Yelp page).

    Prior to opening this book, my Italian was mostly limited to musical terms (allegro!) and designer labels (Dolce and Gabbana). I loved eating pasta and could throw together some dry pasta and jarred marinara sauce, but my familiarity with dishes was limited to Alfredo, marinara, vodka, pesto, Chef Boyardee’s canned ravioli, and the mushy elementary school cafeteria spaghetti that was scooped like ice cream onto styrofoam trays. (If any of you remember that school lunch spaghetti, let me know!)

    Through Vegana Italiana, Tara Punzone has introduced me to cacio e pepe (DIVINE), spaghetti a la puttanesca (spicy and salty, yum!), and spaghetti aglio, olio, e peperoncino (simple and tasty).

    Al Dente

    A useful technique I learned from this book is to cook the pasta only a little more than half the time as instructed on the box, and then add pasta water to the sauce. This results in the noodles ready to soak up more moisture and flavor from the actual pasta sauce, and an al dente texture—deliciously firm to the bite.

    Loose-agna

    Emboldened by my success with the other recipes in the cookbook, I decided to play fast and loose with the sauce portions in the lasagna pura. I ended up with a mountain of wet pasta in which the lasagna kept slipping around the sauces. Lesson learned: follow the directions so that my lasagna looks like historic layers of geological sediment rather than messy hot lava.

    Adapting Ingredients to Fit My Budget and Tastebuds

    At first glance, some of the traditional ingredients were intimidating for my budget. Canned San Marzano tomatoes, highly regarded as the best for making pasta sauces, go for about $6 a can from what I’ve seen online! I’ve adapted the recipes to my wallet and pantry by using cheaper alternatives like regular tomatoes where the recipe calls for San Marzano tomatoes, and by occasionally going without the toppings like parsley or the crumbly bread.

    Also…in the course of preparing dishes from this cookbook, I learned that fresh parsley tastes like soap and peppery lawn mower clippings to me! I thought it was only cilantro that did that to certain people. Since my taste buds are cool with cilantro I may consider using fresh cilantro where parsley is listed as an ingredient.

    Among its recipes, Vegana Italiana also offers recipes for creating pasta noodles from scratch. I’d love to make these one day but in the meantime (let’s face it), I have a newborn! My main goal with this cookbook was to learn how to make more dishes, so to save time I’ve made them using store-bought ingredients like marinara sauce and dried pasta. The exception to this would be the creamy sauces like Alfredo, and cheeses like cashew ricotta and mozzarella.

    Since vegan Alfredo sauces are less readily available than marinara (and expensive at around $9 a jar), I’ve made the full batch of Tara Punzone’s cashew-based Alfredo sauce and stored the extra in glass jars in my fridge for later use. It’s heavenly, by the way: creamy and rich.

    My adaptations may be a bastardization of the cookbook but my point is that although the recipes in Vegana Italiana occasionally list specific ingredients like a certain type of salt or a canned tomatoes from a certain region, they are highly adaptable and flexible to one’s budget, taste buds, and pantry. If you want to be true to the restaurant-quality, original recipe then you have the information you need, and if you want to substitute ingredients with cheaper alternatives to fit your budget and pantry then you can do it and still create a great-tasting dish. This is a strong plus to me as a cookbook: for the price of a plate of pasta you can learn to make unlimited, obscene quantities of pasta wherever you are. For the price of a single plate of pasta (~$25), I’ve already made over $200 worth of pasta dishes.

    Where to Find Vegana Italiana

    Amazon

    Barnes & Noble

    Bookshop.org (support your local indie bookstore)

    Veganizing Cuisines Around the World

    I’m curious, what other cookbooks out there have deliciously veganized a culture’s cuisine for you? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

  • Seeing Dead People: where one’s past bleeds into the present

    Seeing Dead People: where one’s past bleeds into the present

    As I was about to give birth to my firstborn child, I began to see dead people in the faces of the people around me.

    It started during the second night of attempted labor induction. My husband was sleeping in the couch next to my bed. I lay in my bed, fading in and out of sleep, partially dilated and waiting for my baby to come.

    The door opened. One of the assistant night nurses walked into my room to take my blood pressure. I looked at her, saw my late friend Megan’s face, and did a double-take to check my reality. From her fine-textured blond hair to her blue eyes and the freckles on her face, and even her calm, rational demeanor, this nurse was my late friend Megan’s doppelganger. Megan had passed away suddenly in 2019 from a heart attack. I had seen her a few days before she died, and she had mentioned having angina and had an appointment with her cardiologist scheduled for the following week. But then her brother reached out to me when I was at work a few days later and told me that Megan had passed away in her condo.

    Although I knew this was not Megan, seeing someone with Megan’s face, hair, and body being alive and well in the world filled me with a sense of peace. It was like peering into a parallel universe in which a version of her was alive.

    I tried not to stare too hard.

    Was I going insane, trying to find the familiar in the unfamiliar?

    Or was my transition into motherhood bringing up feelings of loneliness and memories of old faces? I would have loved for Megan and my sister to meet Baby Daniel. And although I am willfully estranged from my parents, I grieve the relationship I wish I had with them…an emotionally safe one that does not exist.

    Or was I dying? Isn’t it a thing that people see their departed loved ones right before they die?

    Ultimately, the induction failed. After reaching 7 centimeters of dilation, I burned with fever from amniocentesis and Baby Daniel’s heart rate began dipping with each contraction. The nurse and doctor spoke to me and a few minutes later, I was rolled into the operating room for a c-section. Compared to the two nights of attempted labor induction, the c-section was quick and completed after 40 or so minutes.

    After the c-section, Baby Daniel was placed in a clear plastic bassinet in our postpartum room, next to my hospital bed. I reached over the edge of the bassinet to hold his tiny, soft hands—and before my eyes flashed the memory of my mother holding my sister’s stiff, gray hands in the casket.

    I gazed at Baby Daniel and saw the baby eyes of my sister staring back at me. But perhaps all newborns look the same: freshly decompressed from being squished inside a uterus for the past several months.

    Daniel was conceived not long before or after my sister’s death. Because of the close timing of the two events, I could not think of one without remembering the other.

    I have found it is more socially acceptable to celebrate than it is to grieve. Celebrations are social, but grief is personal. One’s celebration makes others feel good. One’s loss makes others feel uncomfortable—partly because different people grieve differently and we don’t know how to comfort everyone (some want to be left alone, others don’t want to be alone). Grief has a shelf life, a socially accepted window of time in which it is okay, or even expected, to express grief, and after that window closed, I felt I was supposed to shift, at least publicly, to being excited about my pregnancy. It was easier for others to celebrate with me about the pregnancy than to grieve with me about my sister. It felt like I was supposed to be excited now since I was pregnant, even though my sister’s death was nearly as fresh as my pregnancy.

    But the thing was, although I was happy about the pregnancy, I was still dealing with the emotional fallout of my sister’s suicide, my estrangement from my parents, and the childhood trauma I had spent most of my adulthood avoiding.

    Needing the space and time to grieve, I withdrew into myself.

    And now, as I navigate new parenthood and Baby Daniel’s first days in this world, my mind straddles the past and present, grasping for connections, no matter how tenuous.

    My Mother’s Motherhood

     As a new parent, I have finally reached the same life stage I’ve only ever known my parents to be in. My mom had me when she was 20. My dad was 27. During the dark hours of the morning I wonder what it might have been for my mom, who had met my dad through a matchmaker in her village and then moved across an ocean to marry him and have a baby without any family or extended relatives in America.

    Baby knowledge was harder to come by in 1990, when I was born. Nowadays I can enter a search or question in Google or parenting forums for informal advice and parenting perspectives and anecdotes, but back then, my mom would have relied on whatever she learned while growing up or asking people, or maybe a book. Without her “village,” my mom was left to handle a newborn baby equipped with only her own knowledge and instincts. I don’t know how she treated me as a baby.

    When I was six, my brother was born, at 8.5 pounds. I pretended to sleep while my mom held and screamed at my baby brother to sleep. Her thunderous voice and the rage behind it scared me. Silently, beneath the covers of my bed, I begged to God to make my brother stop crying. But he would keep crying all night long.

    My sister was born seven years after my brother, at 10.5 pounds. She would also cry a lot at night. While trying to rock my crying sister to sleep, my mom would get frustrated and say things like “hope your whole family dies” (sounds more succinct in Chinese) and “I wish I had aborted you,” which makes me suspect my sister was a surprise baby.

    Nowadays, a web search reveals tips and advice for dealing with a fussy baby. And a foray into parenting forums would find other parents with whom one could commiserate about baby sleep issues. My mom had none of these resources in the ‘90s. On top of that, my mom had left behind her family and friends when she moved to the United States to marry my dad.

    On one hand, my mom was making the most of what she had. But then I remember the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse she inflicted on me and the rest of the family—deep harm that her lack of knowledge or trauma cannot justify, harm that eroded the confidence of her children, and harm that comes from denying the harm that she and my dad inflicted. After remembering these things, I remind myself that having a hard life does not excuse her decision to abuse us. Then I feel angry. And the cycle of thought repeats until I get tired of it and start scrolling through Amazon for a quick distraction.

    I’m filled with gratitude for the resources I do have today. My husband shares household tasks and nighttime shifts with me. I go to therapy. I have access to internet resources and forums that offer tips and anecdotes that help me feel less alone. I’m no longer in touch with my toxic parents so they cannot add to my level of stress.

    Regression & Upheaval

    Becoming a new mom has sifted old memories from the bottom of my pond into the surface. How was my mom when I was a child? How will I be as a mother to my own child? I catch myself sliding back into memories, hangups, and issues I thought I had already processed. Childhood abuse. Sexual abuse. Why are we going through this again?

    In a recent therapy session I expressed grief about the relationship I wished I’d had with my parents. But this was something I’d worked through several months ago. My therapist asked if I was reconsidering my estrangement (a hard no) or if I just wanted to express my feelings of grief (yes), and suggested that instead of using the word “regress,” I can use the word “upheaval” to reframe this resurgence of old memories amid my transition into motherhood.

    I have also been thinking about my sister’s suicide. My mind has preoccupied itself with futile exercises such as wondering how things were like for her during her last days and moments, imagining the pain she must have felt for a long time, and what abuse she suffered alone from our parents. And feeling shame by how I had let myself assume my mother had somehow softened and changed with two subsequent children, even though the likelier truth was that she had learned to hide her worst impulses from me after I moved out. I also think about how I failed my sister by playing along with our parents’ “happy family” façade.

    On the outside, I looked like I was functioning well. My sister wouldn’t have seen the anger that simmered just beneath the surface, or how growing up with my mother’s temper and my dad’s enabling had molded me into an anxious, self-hating, fearful people-pleaser. My sister must have felt so alone in her own experience. She was in so much pain but could not see it reflected in anyone but herself, because I was hiding it deep inside me all along.

    During late night feedings at 2 AM, I look at Baby Daniel and see my sister’s eyes staring back into my soul. It is too late for me to save my sister but I can still protect my baby.

    The “Shit Pie” Metaphor

    Recently I came across the “shit pie” metaphor for situations in which abuse has occurred, where things are great when they’re good, and terrible when they’re bad: If you are eating a pie, and it’s an amazing, delicious pie with fresh, luxurious ingredients, but then you find out there is also shit in that pie, do you keep eating that pie? When I feel conflicted about my decision to cut off contact with my parents, I think of the pie and how sad it is to throw away a whole delicious pie because of a piece of shit in it. It doesn’t matter how good the rest of the pie is; the shit has contaminated it and made the entire pie unsafe to eat.

  • new motherhood. two weeks postpartum.

    new motherhood. two weeks postpartum.

    I guess you can say I’m deep in the weeds. In the thick of it. Deeply hormonal, with a two-week-old newborn next to me. I am sleep-deprived. It’s all happening now and my attempts to form my experience into words result in incoherent ramblings (like this one).

    I still feel like old me but also like new me, ready to be reinvented amid this new transition. Like Gandalf the Grey becoming Gandalf the White. Eden the Childless (Pre-Child? Child-Free? It all feels loaded) to Eden the Mother.

    Physically I feel more alert and mobile now that I’m no longer pregnant. Recovering from a C-section while being newly postpartum and with a lingering cough from a cold really sucked. Every cough felt like knives stabbing my lower abdomen. I’ve lost 15 pounds, and although I weigh about 20 pounds heavier than I did before the pregnancy, I relish not bumping my belly into the stove burner control knobs while cooking.

    But emotionally, I feel turbulent and unmoored. How is it that I feel like myself and yet not myself?

    On one hand, gazing into my baby’s eyes while holding him and feeding him has been magical. I cry thinking about how fast he is already growing. He has outgrown the newborn-sized diapers and clothing, and fits into 3-month-sized clothes as a two-week-old baby. I listen to the sounds he makes. The soft coos. The angry cries. The fussy grunts. His little hands open and close around my finger as he looks up at the ceiling fan.

    I see genetic echoes of my dead sister in the shape and shininess of his eyes and the shape of his cheeks. After all, she and I share 50% of our genes as siblings. It’s uncanny. It feels like my baby sister (circa 2003) is staring back at me with her eyes, but I know it is not her, and only genetic echoes of her reflected in my son, staring back at me.

    It’s like when you are going about your day and you see someone who strongly resembles a long-dead loved one. You know they’re not them, but at the same time, it is uncanny, to see someone with those same or very-similar features moving about the world. I wonder if I resemble a dead loved one to someone else in the world. Maybe we all do.

    On the other hand, I find myself feeling sensitive, paranoid of judgment from other people, about my life decisions, my capabilities as a new mother. I sweat as people watch me placate my baby. The act of changing a diaper in front of others (except my husband) has become a hands-on pop quiz on parenting skills 101.

    This feeling of inadequacy extends beyond motherhood and into the realm of my creative pursuits. My creative bandwidth is limited now, of course. For the most part I do not mind it because I am trying to cherish the time I have with the baby. But I feel a deep sense of shame that I don’t have anything to show for all the work and enthusing I did for my failed projects – two unfinished novels that I no longer have interest in completing. I had written those under different mindsets that now feel foreign and far away to me. If my mind is always changing so much, am I really equipped for long-term projects like a novel? As of right now I don’t have a story to tell except my own, which is ongoing as long as I am alive. I also feel ashamed for feeling bad about this.

    I know I should be resting when he is resting, but my mind is restless and hungry. My brain wants to consume something satisfying and juicy. Reddit feeds me headlines and bot-driven conversations of troubling global news–as a result, I look at my soft, swaddle-wrapped potato and dread the war he would would be called to fight when he comes of age.

    These thoughts are heavy but I have been fortunate to have a husband who has been hands-on in being a new dad and sharing night shifts on feeding-diapering-sleeping our baby. I am grateful and happy to witness and share in his transition into new fatherhood.

    These are my two weeks postpartum thoughts. I don’t have the energy to tie them together with a unifying thesis, but I wanted to share them in case somebody out there can relate to this experience, or somehow find it valuable.

  • Losing Friends as a New Parent – Is It Really Inevitable?

    Becoming a parent is a big life transition, one I’d been dreading for quite a while because of what I’ve heard from other people. You’ll never see your friends again. People drop off the map.

    I did have a friend (let’s call her Cang) who dropped her end of the rope after becoming a parent. We weren’t part of each other’s core friendship groups (she too maintained a group of old friends from middle school) so maybe this was part of why she chose to cut me out. After a couple of planned dates that didn’t work out from her end, I reached out to her via messages, and while she would respond, she ultimately stopped initiating. And eventually, after a few more one-sided exchanges, I stopped initiating, and as a result, we haven’t communicated since December 2023 when I reached out to her to wish her a merry Christmas and a happy birthday. Her son was about three years old.

    Maybe Cang felt there was a disconnect because I wasn’t a parent and she was, and perhaps there were things that I wouldn’t understand as a non-parent. Maybe she had outgrown the friendship since becoming a parent. This could be true, and I think she might have dropped me because I was always on the peripheral of her friendships–nice to have but not core–and so she could afford to drop me when priorities became tight. I imagine she would prioritize her middle school friends, and I get it.

    Our friendship died slowly, via slow “ghosting,” where I noticed only when I reached out, and later on, when I reviewed the time stamps and realized it had been a long time since I had last reached out to her, that she hadn’t initiated in our last few interactions, and that I now had little to talk about with her. There was no breakup message, she simply stopped watering the friendship and let it wither away. In her garden of friendships, ours was ultimately pruned via thirst.

    I pushed away my hurt and moved on with life even though it haunts me now, as I am about to give birth. I suppose I have the option to reach out to her again now in hopes of reconnecting now that I am also a parent, but the hurt remains and I don’t like the idea of being discarded again as soon as my compatibility wanes.

    Some of the things I cherish most in the world are my close friendships with my ride-or-die homies. These are the homies who showed up for our courthouse wedding, officiated by low-budget Bernie Sanders, who hugged me tightly during the fallout of my first marriage, and who went to my sister’s funeral. Even as my pregnancy progressed and mobility became an issue, I made it a point to host gatherings to bring my closest friends together–a precious thing in today’s fast-moving world and our adult lives. I grew up feeling very lonely, and friendships were like a ray of light in my mostly isolated existence, a lighthouse in the stormy waters of my childhood.

    As I’m on the cusp of giving birth, I dread losing these friendships. I’m afraid parenthood will somehow change me or my priorities to the point where I will drop these friendships, like those stories I’ve heard about people who disappear into parenthood and fall off from their friendships.

    I guess I’m afraid of the Unknown: where my mind will be as a new parent. I’m afraid I will become (due to brain changes, post-partum depression or stress) someone who no longer cares about these friendships, who lets them wither away like Cang did with my friendship. After I’m afraid my new priorities as a mom will cause me to drop everything that made me “me,” like my reading, my writing, and my friendships. Will these things no longer be important to me? Will I change that much as a person?

    I hear so much about new parents who feel like they’ve lost who they were before becoming parents. But I also hear that it gets better with time, as the baby grows and learns to sleep through the night.

    I guess this is something I won’t know until I’ve crossed the bridge. And perhaps these fears are unfounded based on the actual facts. Although I am the first in the group of homies to become a parent, my friends have been so supportive. They’ve filled our home with love. They’re going to be really cool aunties and uncles to Baby Daniel. Perhaps because I have this on my mind, and because it’s so important, I will find some way to maintain these precious friendships with my homies. Our friendships may change, just as they did when we became full-fledged adults with adult responsibilities of jobs, bills, and other duties, but it would mean the world to me if our friendships evolve, rather than wither, as we move through these new life milestones.

  • Reflections Before Giving Birth to My First Child

    My husband and I have been sick this week. First he was sick, and then two days later, I woke up with a swollen, irritated throat that evolved into a runny nose and then ongoing congestion and a lingering wet cough. The worst of it is over as of today. I’m glad I won’t have to give birth while suffering a cold. In between household tasks I have been laying in bed like a beached whale, resting my feet and catching my breath.

    In two days, we will go to the hospital to undergo induction to give birth to our first child and son. At 39 weeks, Baby Daniel will be full term, although being induced feels like prematurely evicting him (although who knows if he’d come early anyway). I feel bad. I imagine he’s nice and warm and comfortable in there. I feel him rolling, kicking, and hiccuping. He has passed all his non-stress tests with flying colors. “Happy baby,” the nurses call him.

    I picture his little hands and feet curling and kicking in the womb. I picture the nutrients being exchanged between us through the umbilical cord, which will be severed upon birth. This is the closest we will ever be linked physically, and after this point, the process of parenthood begins of raising him and slowly letting go as he grows more independent.

    Although my pregnancy has come with health complications and bodily discomforts, Baby Daniel’s impending departure feels bittersweet. Is it weird to say I will miss him, even though he will be right next to me as a newborn?

    This is the end of one stage (pregnancy) and the beginning of another one (new motherhood with a newborn). I am about to cross a bridge for the first time and have no idea how I feel once I’ve crossed it. I hope I will be happy. I hope the baby blues don’t hit me hard.

    On the surface, life has been peaceful. Joe and I were blessed to receive so much love and support from friends and chosen family at our baby shower. The silver lining of the estrangement from my parents has been peace and the ability to grieve my sister and process my childhood trauma in therapy.  

    I think of my mother, and her dark mood swings and constant meltdowns surrounding the times of her pregnancies and births of my little brother and sister. My father told me as a child that she’d tried to kill herself when she was pregnant with me. I think of how I used to resent my baby sister (13 years my junior) because of how angry and abusive my mother became toward me during her pregnancy. I believe my sister was a surprise baby, which could have contributed to my mother’s extra unhappiness. “I wish I’d aborted you,” my mother would say when trying to nurse her to sleep.

    Baby Daniel has been shy in ultrasounds all pregnancy—his hands are always in front of his face or he is turned away. We’ve been unable to get a clear 3D shot of him, so his face, beyond the basic outline, is mostly a mystery. I wonder how it will feel like to hold him in my arms, and to behold his little face—part me, and part Joe. Will he be a big baby or a regular-sized baby? A colicky baby or a chill baby? So much of Baby Daniel is unknown and abstract to me right now, aside from when we poke at each other through my tummy. I guess I won’t have a lot of answers until we are holding Baby Daniel in our arms and marveling at his sleeping form, how fragile, precious, and tiny he is, in our big, wide world.

  • When We Weren’t Afraid

    When We Weren’t Afraid

    As kids, my little brother and I would ride our bikes along the bike path, and along the way we would encounter this young homeless guy and say hi. He was usually doing his own thing, but I forget what now. Probably just hanging around. At some point we stopped to offer him some money, about a dollar or two.

    “No thanks,” he said, squinting up at us with a face that resembled a rugged Jason Mraz—brown hair, blue eyes, the beginnings of crow’s feet. “I don’t take money from kids.”

    We offered him a snack-sized bag of Cheetos from our biking snacks stash, which he accepted.

    Most of our conversations were about snacks that my brother and I wanted to give him. He didn’t talk much about his life or how he had ended up homeless and we didn’t ask.

    Eventually we stopped seeing him on the trail.

    A few years later, my brother and I went to a nearby store and saw a brown-haired homeless guy resembling Jason Mraz laughing to himself while smashing some apples with his feet in the parking lot. If he recognized me and my brother, he didn’t show it at all.

    But at the time my brother and I drew the same connection in our heads: our guy had gone crazy.

    We never saw him again.  

    I look back at those times and think about how we didn’t think much of approaching a homeless guy at the time. Nowadays I’m a lot more wary of strangers. Maybe it’s from all those crime documentaries, or maybe I’m just more aware of the ugly parts of human nature now.

  • Pandan in Autumn: a short story

    Pandan in Autumn: a short story

    A clump of brown leaves tumbled down beside Jenny and into the mud.

    An icy breeze went through the fibers of her sweater, biting into her skin. She shivered and pulled her rust orange cardigan closer to herself. She had long lost feeling below her waist—the bench beneath her might as well have been carved from ice. She was sitting under one of only three trees in the park—and the other two had already gone bald.

    Grumpily, she reached into her wicker basket purchased from Amazon and pulled out a plastic-wrapped apple butter sandwich. She had made sandwiches to enjoy with her grandmother after this but felt like eating something sweet to cheer herself up.

    She unwrapped the sandwich and snuck a bite. It was…underwhelming. Cold, cloyingly sweet, sticky, and gummy. The bread stuck to the roof of her mouth as she chewed. It needed to be toasted but it was too cold out here.

    She had planned for a week to experience this—a quintessential autumn picnic, the kind that Youtube influencers filmed themselves enjoying with a cup of pumpkin spice latte and twirling among the colorful leaves. Such glee. Such joy.

    But here? It was cold as hell, and Jenny could have sworn she witnessed a drug deal between a guy in a green beanie and a couple of guys who pulled up in a pickup truck. A few feet away, a homeless woman kicked trash can over and cursed at the top of her lungs.

    This wasn’t New England. It wasn’t even Colorado. But it was the closest thing to a fall experience she could get around here in her little town, in a tiny park the size of a six-car parking lot.

     This isn’t fun. Why am I still here?

    Maybe fall would be more enjoyable in an actual fall town than her local drug dealer’s workplace. She could save up for a visit. What if she was more in love with the idea of fall than actual fall?

    Her cell phone vibrated. It was her grandma. “Hello Gran,” she said. “I’ll be on my way soon. I made some apple butter sandwiches but to be honest they’re not very good.”

    “Don’t worry,” said Grandma, laughing. “I’m sure they’re fine. I was wondering if you would be able to bring over some rice flour and green onions—I’m making your favorite croquettes and ran out.”

    Her grandmother lived in an apartment on the other side of town and Jenny visited her once every two weeks. She would have invited her grandma to picnic here but her grandma preferred to stay at home.

    “Of course, Gran.” Jenny’s stomach grumbled at the thought of eating her grandma’s croquettes, a combination of chewy rice flour, minced green onions, shredded carrots, and minced pork—it was more of a family recipe—it wasn’t anything she’d ever seen in a restaurant menu. They said their goodbyes and hung up. She stood up from the cold bench, pulled her wicker basket onto her elbow and strode out of the park to drive to the Vietnamese supermarket a few blocks away.

    As she filled her basket with green onions and rice flour, she saw some pandan cakes—green stripes of pandan-flavored jelly interspersed with layers of mung bean—and decided to get some to enjoy with her grandmother later. Maybe the quintessential autumn for her didn’t have colorful leaves and New England scenery, but it had her grandmother, some delicious fried croquettes, and pandan cake. And maybe the apple butter sandwiches would taste better after she toasted them.

  • We Were Bold, We Were Six

    We Were Bold, We Were Six

    The apex of the tall metal slide towered over our heads as it breached the clouds. It took forever to climb the stairs to get to the top, and by the time I made it, I looked down at the ground, now comprised of a smattering of colors and moving shapes. I trembled. If I fall…

    I spent the first six years of my life in inland Northern California. During the winter it would rain and then the puddles in the soccer fields would freeze over, creating a smooth, matte surface. My first-grade classmates and I would take turns jumping on the ice until the top layer cracked like a the surface of a creme brulee, soaking our shoes and socks with icy, brown water.

    School rules forbade us from going to the end of the field, where the fence overlooked a large swimming pool with multiple lanes. Whenever the teachers on duty caught us venturing towards the fence, they would grab a megaphone to call us back with threats of yellow cards or (gasp!) red cards.

    On some mornings a thick coat of fog would wrap itself across the field and we kids would mistakenly think it would disguise our presence as we hurried toward the fence, only to hear a teacher’s voice sputter angrily from the megaphone.

    At six years of age, I had already experienced moments of terror and tension at home–getting beaten by my mother, and watching her beat and scream at my dad and grandma. My father groped me but at the time it seemed like a normal thing within the family, under the banner of playful affection from a Chinese father. The weight of this experience wouldn’t catch up to me until later, as I underwent puberty.

    At school, away from hitting hands and groping hands, I was able to enjoy the moment with my friends, exploring the forbidden edges of the world, and pressing our feet on ice to see how much it could hold before cracking. We were bold, we were six.

  • After the Glitter: a short story

    After the Glitter: a short story

    This is what happens when you peak in high school, thought Vanessa Phan, looking at a photo of herself and her friends from the late ‘90s. I fit into size 00 Guess jeans back then, she mused, as a wave of bitterness washed over her. I ruled the quad with Jenna Tran and Ana Xayavong. Boys adored us. The possibilities were endless.

    She was smoking in her car with her windows rolled down in the parking lot of a strip mall. She checked the time and rolled her eyes, leaning back against her torn leather seat. “Eight more fucking minutes,” she muttered under her breath. Her former coworker, Tina, had left to become a CNA at a senior home nearby. Vanessa’s new coworker, Patty, was nice and all, but kept making mistakes with the register that Vanessa had to fix.

    She looked at herself in the rearview mirror. I was beautiful once. But now, shadows grew under her eyes. Wrinkles were starting to form on her forehead—and she was too broke to afford Botox, Dysport, or whatever else people with too much money were injecting into their foreheads these days. She looked like a faded, tired version of who she once was.

    Vanessa worked at a chain dollar store in a small, shithole town in the middle of Dusty-Ass California—no, not the cool beachy side or even the cool foresty side, but the side that was as hot as a furnace much of the year. But at least it was not the one she graduated from. That would be too humiliating. From Facebook, she knew that Ana had gone on to earn her cosmetology license and now worked at a salon cutting hair. Jenna went to community college and became an LVN at a big hospital. And Vanessa? Well, her life took a detour after high school.

    She never told anyone from school, but her father would snoop.through her underwear drawer and ask her questions about it. And she would hear him checking her bedroom doorknob at night. One night she forgot to lock it and woke up to see him hovering over her from the side of her bed, with his right hand moving inside his gray pajama pants.

    After graduating from high school, she moved in with her 23-year-old boyfriend named Peter and hung around with him and his friends. Pete was in a gang and he didn’t talk much about it with her, only that it was better the less she knew, and she never pressed him for more information. During the week, she would work at a pizza shop. On the weekends, she would go out clubbing with Pete and his friends.

    A breeze of hot air from outside blew her brassy blond hair into her face. She was long overdue for a hair trim—her parched hair was plagued by split ends. Her nails—well, she gave up on regular manicures and pedicures a long time ago. But it’s not like she was clubbing or raving these days.

    But it was so fun while it lasted.

    A ghost of a smile crept into her lips as she took another drag from her cigarette.11 PM felt like a beginning of many fun possibilities; 5 AM felt like death, as she was coming down from the ecstasy. But in those sacred hours between 11 PM and 2 AM, the world was magic. The music and bodies melted into each other with warmth and movement. Sound waves swirled around her as the deep bass beat in rhythm. As the high coursed through her body, she felt at one with the world. Infinite.

    Then the morning would come. Her glitter and sequins, which had felt like magical shimmers the night before, felt garish and bleak in the unforgiving light of dawn. Her throat was parched, her makeup was peeling, and her head throbbed. She would hide from the world in Pete’s dingy bedroom with the curtains shut, trying to be as quiet and still as possible. Is this all it will ever be? a small voice in her head would ask.

    One day, she received a phone call from the police. Pete had been found in a ditch with two gun wounds in his back. The cops wrote it off as gang-related and left it at that. Of course the cops didn’t bother to do a thorough investigation, she thought bitterly. They didn’t give two shits about him. Vanessa cried at his funeral, along with Pete’s friends. Even though they’d had a rocky relationship towards the end, they had also had a lot of good memories together.

    After Pete’s death, as she lay in their bed and listened to the overhead fan creak in the ceiling, she reflected on their relationship and realized she had overlooked a lot of things when Peter was still alive—his temper, and how he had punched two holes in the bedroom at separate times during their relationship. One time it was because she kept confronting him about a girl named Angel who kept texting him late at night. The other time it was because a handsome waiter made a joke about the menu and she had laughed back. “Look what you made me do,” he said, as the holes in the wall gaped and cracked. He would also get very close to her and punch the air around her head. Maybe one reason she’d been so willing to overlook these things was because she had nowhere to go. She didn’t want to go back to her father. She didn’t want to leave Peter and the life they had shared together, outside of those rage episodes.

    She felt bad for remembering these things. It felt like she was tarnishing the image of him as her hero, the one who pulled her away from her creepy father.

    But his death had given her another point of clarity. In the haze of the clubbing and raving, she and her old friends from high school had grown apart. Their friendships had withered away and now it felt weird to text them out of the blue.

    Then she’d found out she was pregnant.

    Although she had never truly joined the gang or participated in running its businesses, she still wore the gang colors when going out with Pete and his friends. One could say that she was affiliated, even if she wasn’t a direct member. People knew she was with Pete.

    She didn’t feel safe in this town anymore. She quit her job at the pizza shop and found an apartment about two desert towns away, which came with a roommate—an older lady named Janice who worked as a lunch lady at a nearby elementary school—and a job at a dollar store. The owners of the dollar store were cheap and there was no air conditioning (only an old, rattling fan), but a shitty job was better than no job.

    She had packed all her belongings in her beat-up car and driven down the freeway on a quiet Sunday morning. During the drive, her thoughts drifted as she drove along the desert landscape. Sometimes her free hand would go to her lower belly, where baby Daniel was a little tadpole curled up inside.

    When Tommy was born and the nurses plopped him onto her chest, she touched his little hands and little face and couldn’t believe that such a precious thing had come from her and Pete.

    And now she was out here with little Tommy, in The Middle of Nowhere, California. It was hot and boring here, but at least she felt safe.  She’d gone to the small town’s resource and referral agency, which had given her a list of low-cost daycare options, including CalWORKS and Early Head Start, which Vanessa somehow miraculously qualified for. She would be picking Baby Tommy up after her shift today, like she does every day.

    Her phone alarm went off. She turned it off and took one last drag of her cigarette before opening a root beer bottle and dropping the cigarette inside, where it joined a forbidden stew of old root beer and other cigarette butts—a melting pot of tar soup. She looked back at the baby car seat through her rearview mirror. I should quit, she thought.  She shook the bottle to drown the cigarette butt and placed it back down beneath the passenger seat.

    Her hand caught on something beneath the seat. She pulled it out.

    It was a college brochure she had pulled from the mailbox yesterday, that she’d forgotten to take out of her purse. She flipped through it. There were the usual offerings of the nursing degrees, but she saw a program for Certified Nurse Assistant. Her former coworker Tina had left the store to become a CNA, saying the pay was better and that training didn’t take very long, even if the work was harder.  Maybe she could text her tonight to ask about how things were going.

    Vanessa wasn’t sure if this CNA path was the right fit for her, or if there was anything out in the world that she was “meant” to do like those sappy people talk about in inspirational videos.

    She didn’t want to work at the dollar store for the rest of her life, especially since the owners were thinking about raising the prices to $1.99, something about tariffs. A few months ago they had already raised the prices to $1.50—which had already hurt business, as customers grumbled to her about how Walmart was cheaper now.

    Tommy was too little right now for Vanessa to work and go to school, but maybe when he was a bit older, she could figure out some daycare options to take classes in the evening.

    Right now she was barely making ends meet—having a roommate and using state programs for daycare and food assistance was helping her and Tommy survive, and she had squirreled away some savings when she was still living with Pete. But now she and Tommy could really use that extra cushion. Even if CNA wasn’t the right program for her, the local community college still offered other types of careers. She imagined herself working in an air-conditioned hospital, with the fresh smell of sanitizer and clean walls and floors. She pictured herself typing away on a computer in an office (also air-conditioned), with a stylish little bag next to her, and being able to buy nice things for Tommy.

    She tucked the brochure back in her bag and locked the car. As she walked back towards the dollar store, she found herself smiling.

  • Cool Asian Americans: on double eyelids, belonging, and learning not to measure worth by beauty

    Cool Asian Americans: on double eyelids, belonging, and learning not to measure worth by beauty

    While my body fights off this uncomfortable cold, I will share a little something with you that I scribbled down recently after reviewing Kaila Yu’s memoir, Fetishized. This is a vulnerable reflection about my own personal relationship with feeling beautiful as an Asian American.

    ***

    Cool Asian Americans. Import cars, pinup models, house parties, clubbing, and raves…This was a scene I never belonged to as a young Chinese American, partly because my family lived far from other Asians.

    I grew up near the border. The only times I saw other Chinese Americans was during the weekends, when my parents would make the long drive to the Chinese-Vietnamese supermarket in City Heights, and drop me and my brother off at Chinese school held on the second floor of a Buddhist temple.

    The other reason was because I was fat, ugly, and socially awkward. Of course, it didn’t help that my home environment was stifling and oppressive.

    Kaila Yu’s memoir stirred up old pain and feelings of envy in me, and I am ashamed to admit this. I found myself envying her freedom to sneak out at night and party with friends (clearly her parents weren’t as scary as mine), her beauty, and especially her outgoingness and success with making friends with the cool Asian crowd–the very types of people that excluded and made fun of me in Chinese school.

    But despite these differences between us, I found her inner experience very relatable because of how she used beauty as a tool or standard by which she could obtain that external validation she craved, in order to fill the void of self love within her.

    I found myself comparing us in our respective journeys toward self-love and acceptance, and decided to use her life story as a launching pad from which I could explore my own. 

    She and I were opposite sides of the same coin – deep down we both yearned to belong, to find social approval, and to be loved.

    While Kaila was slim, beautiful, and roamed San Gabriel with the cool party Asians, I was an obese, pimply teenager saddled by heavy AP textbooks, stuck inside my parents’ house because they wouldn’t let me go out. Where her father ignored her, my lecherous father paid me too much attention. Where her mom seemed supportive of some of her choices, even recommending plastic surgeons for her, I endured my mom’s rages, unable to hide because I wasn’t allowed to leave the house without a chaperone.

    The brief experiences with cool Asian Americans that I met at Chinese school and while volunteering in Taiwan (AID Taiwan 2007) were laced with pain and exclusion. As I mentioned earlier, I was overweight and riddled with acne, I didn’t wear the cool shoes or the cool brands, and I didn’t have the charm or social skills to navigate through social situations with unspoken rules. 

    Volunteering for a month in Taiwan to teach a English to kids in disadvantaged towns was a nightmare for the overly sheltered introvert I was, who went from spending most of my time studying and reading at home after school to being surrounded by hundreds of outgoing and outspoken Taiwanese- and Chinese-American teenagers with practically zero time to myself. I felt like I had to be “on” all the time. It was exhausting. I ended up dissociating a lot, even on stage when I was supposed to speak. 

    I was sitting alone in between activities one day during volunteer training when I overheard another volunteer say to his friend, “She doesn’t know how to suck up to people. That‘s why she has no friends.” 

    That line cut me deeply, because it felt true, I was shy and had a hard time talking to people, let alone flattering them. It was so painful to have my very insecurity identified and voiced by someone else. 

    I tried to be nice to him nonetheless, to turn the other cheek, to prove him wrong about not being able to suck up to people. We made eye contact through the bus window at some point. I waved at him. He just stared back at me coldly, like I was nothing more than a pimple, unworthy of his friendship.

    Sometimes when I’m laying in bed at night, that volunteer’s words haunt me and I feel like hurling myself down a deep chasm in the ground and staying there forever.

    While training and volunteering, I saw how the little kids at the schools and other volunteers admired the prettier girls who had the slim bodies and big eyes. They were treated with a sort of kindness and interest that I envied. I wanted to be liked that way, to navigate the world with beauty and ease. 

    From those experiences I came to the same conclusion as Kaila: that beauty and status are important and must be chased. Kaila was much more successful at being beautiful, and much more adept at navigating social situations.

    The silver lining of being fat is that the extra fat gave me some decent B cups, so I didn’t stress as much about my breasts, except for when my dad would leer at them and ask me if I was wearing a bra. He did this into my early 30s, until I estranged myself from my parents for other reasons. 

    My Obsession with Double Eyelids

    After that volunteer trip, I became obsessed with double eyelids and the fact that I did not have them. It didn’t help that I was told I had small, slanted eyes my whole life, from both racist kids at school and also well-meaning friends (“your eyes are so chinky!” a Filipino friend had exclaimed to me back in middle school). I looked at the kids at my Chinese school who had bigger eyes, and told myself, If only you had bigger eyes. You wouldn’t have gone through all that bullying about having small, slanted eyes. You would have been accepted by the other Chinese Americans at Chinese School. People would have treated you better. You would have been beautiful.

    I became obsessed with getting larger eyes. I repeated to myself my conclusions that if I had prettier eyes via a crease on my eyelids, maybe my life would be different. Maybe I would be treated better by other Chinese people. Maybe I wouldn’t have been bullied as much for the shape and size of my eyes as a kid. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. 

    I learned how to use double eyelid tapes and glue to temporarily achieve that crease on my eyelids, and once had a terrible experience when I tried using Nexcare, a liquid antiseptic bandage instead of eyelid glue, figuring that an even stronger glue would lead to stronger results (and totally ignoring the label warning to KEEP OUT OF EYE AREA). The burning in my eyes was a temporary trip to beauty hell, a painful punishment for my vanity. I was spared a trip to the ER by rinsing my eyes with lots of water.

    I never ended up getting the double eyelid surgery, partly because of the cost and the recovery time (I have a lot of fat in the eyelid so an incision would likely be necessary), and partly because of the principle. A small, morally defiant part of me felt that if I got the surgery after all the fuss I’ve made about Asian beauty standards, then all the people who made me feel like shit for the way I looked would win.

    It’s weird: I felt more self-conscious about my monolids around other East Asians than I did around non-Asian people, who didn’t seem to understand the concept of a crease or double-eyelid unless the surgery was very drastic. Since I didn’t hang out with a lot of East Asians, I wasn’t as frequently triggered.

    But sometimes I do wonder what my life would have been like if I’d gotten it. Maybe it would have made me finally confident, like the way post-surgery people sound in their testimonials (“I feel so confident now!”). Or maybe not. Maybe I would’ve continued being the same person with the same insecure struggles, only with a line on my eyelids and $3,000-$5,000 poorer. Maybe I would want to fix my nose or jawline next.

    The Fleeting Nature of Beauty and Social Approval

    Kaila’s book reflects how popularity, status, and social approval is fragile, fleeting, and hard to maintain, no matter how successful we’ve been at obtaining them. When Kaila’s sex video (the one for which she was coerced into) went viral, her guy friends not only watched it as a group but then some of them defriended her afterward—a huge WTF for me. Being beautiful didn’t make her immune to experiencing trauma or a social fallout.

    Throughout my young adult and new adult years, I flagellated myself for not being pretty enough, for not being charming enough, for not having the social skills to navigate social situations. Deep inside I was telling myself that my life would have been less shitty if I were prettier.

    I was spending too much time on social media, too much time gazing at doe-eyed actors on Taiwanese soap operas, and too much time contemplating perfection as depicted in magazines. I was yearning for acceptance from the wrong type of people, people I likely wouldn’t click with anyway, where even if I did manage to grab ahold on some clout for a little while, it wouldn’t last. It would feel hollow because I would be trying to mold myself into an image of beauty rather than being a self I was comfortable in. 

    Part of my self-dissatisfaction was from wanting to be the type of person that enjoyed certain things. I didn’t really enjoy crowded environments (unless my senses were numbed by alcohol or drugs) but wanted to be the type of person who enjoyed those glamorous events, from EDC to raves. When my current partner didn’t want to go to EDC or a rave with me (he’d done so in his youth and was over that phase), I told myself it was because I was too ugly for him to take to EDC or raves, and that if I were prettier, he would be more down to go with me.

    With each rebellion and plastic surgery, Kaila slowly distanced herself from her old self (Elaine Yang) whom she described as shy and nerdy–the one her father didn’t pay attention to. And yet, over time, her new persona (born from people’s expectations due to her success as a sexualized and fetishized pinup model) became exhausting to maintain. She struggled with trying to manufacture a sense of sexual ease she didn’t naturally possess. And after some traumatic experiences, she’d had a hard time getting back in touch with her own body and enjoying her sexuality on her own terms. The latter part of her memoir is about exploring what she can do outside of the context of her looks, and sometimes being pulled back into that old context anyway because of her past, and also because of how popular fetishization is with audiences.

    With my current partner I very briefly explored a fun, party-girl side of myself with the fake lashes, the cocaine, and the parties, but have since mostly gone back to my introspective, creative, and bookish roots, partly due to being in my thirties, working through trauma, my sister’s suicide, and being pregnant and shifting into a new phase of my life.

    But every now and then I would come across something that brings me back to those self-resentful feelings of not being enough–pretty, smart, charming, etc. Unlike Kaila, I got to the point where I could make a living based on my looks. I yearned so much to be beautiful enough to be paid for my looks, like stripper-hot or Cafe Lu-hot, the kind of beauty that guys admire or revere when they talk to each other about the girls they’ve known.

    At this point it is just a form of self-torment, but it has gotten easier now that I am in my mid-thirties. I don’t relate to the grief that some feel when their pretty privilege fades and they can no longer charm themselves out of a driving ticket, skip the line to enter an exclusive club, or make every man’s head swivel whenever they enter a room. The silver lining to being plain for all of my life is that since I never had these privileges, I cannot lose them.

    I wish there was a special word I could use to end this spiral and insecurity forever. Like, “Abracadabra! Now you won’t give a shit about this stuff anymore!” (I’ve tried it, but it didn’t work.)

    I still avoid watching East Asian soap operas like K-dramas and Taiwanese soap operas because my mind gets pulled back into that idealized world where the main character (the special one!) is always the one with the big, beautiful, double-eyelids, the 100-pound frame, and the delicate, v-shaped jawline. I wish I were strong enough to resist being triggered but the fact is that East Asian pop culture is a trigger for me, so I do other things to pass my time.

    These days, to cut myself out of this thought-spiral of beauty-is-everything, I get off of social media, and go to Walmart or the park to look at regular, everyday people going about their lives, without the glamorous filters skewing things. Yeah, there are some good-looking people and some not-so-good-looking people. And in my life there are people I love and cherish who don’t fit in that stripper-hot box either, like my grandma–are they less valuable as human beings because they are not sexy? Of course not. So why am I using that standard to hurt myself?