WINSHEN LIU
You know the kind of school
My friend shared the writing prompt: What is a dish you loved as a child but have never made as an adult? What did you love about it or what memories do you associate with it? Why haven’t you made it yourself? I loved and still love tea eggs. At first, I thought I hadn’t made them due to the time-consuming process, but I have made many time-consuming dishes from scratch (dumplings, mushroom ravioli, mole, tikka masala, etc.). Then I remembered fifth grade, when I brought tea eggs to school for an Ellis Island assignment. I remembered feeling excited, only to experience a “lunchbox moment.” The poem came out of unearthing this memory. Though I know it plays into an immigrant trope, I hope my poem centers on a child’s love for their parents and frames this racism in the context of a school, where problematic lessons were and still are taught.
Assigned in November, we were to
become pilgrims on the
classroom ship, so my mother crafted
dress and collar for me to
emulate Honor and Prudence.
For January’s lesson, we drew
“gentry” or “slave” from a
hat and I wish
I could say we threw Ticonderogas,
jumped onto desks. But I
knew too little then, only afraid of
losing the few friends I had.
March meant Ellis Island Day, when we
needed to bring a dish from
our heritage. Per my request, my
parents braised eggs for hours. The spiced soy sauce
quelled their fears I’d forget where I was from.
Really from. But my classmates showed up with
spaghetti and shortbread. Store-bought cake. It wasn’t that the
teacher opened the pan after dessert, or that my classmates
uttered ew like a punchline. It wasn’t my
voyage home on the bus; it was the pan’s
weight in my mother’s hands, with
exactly the same contents as
yesterday. Two dozen eggs—instead of
zero—inside.
Winshen Liu is from Illinois. Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Frontier Poetry, The Malahat Review, The Rumpus, and Southeast Review, among others. Follow her work at
winshenliu.com.
MORE FROM SPRING 2024 (5:4)