I.
"Mother's Cooking" by Maxine Hong Kingston
"Bread" by Constance Urdang
Notice the wonderful use of concrete detail in this passage and the way in which the mother is brought alive, especially as she tells her monkey story.
My mother has cooked for us: raccoons, skunks, hawks, city pigeons, wild ducks, wild geese, blackskinned bantams, snakes, garden snails, turtles that crawled about the pantry floor and sometimes escaped under refrigerator or stove, catfish that swam in the bathtub. "The emperor used to eat the peaked hump of purple dromedaries," she would say. "They used chopsticks made from rhinoceros horn, and they ate ducks' tongues and monkeys' lips." She boiled the weeds we pulled up in the yard. There was a tender plant with flowers like white stars hiding under the leaves, which were like the flower petals but green. I've not been able to find it since growing up. It had no taste. When I was as tall as the washing machine, I stepped out on the back porch one night, and some heavy, ruffling, windy, clawed thing dived at me. Even after getting chanted back to sensibility, I shook when I recalled that perched everywhere, there were owls with great hunched shoulders and yellow scowls. They were a surprise for my mother from my father. We children used to hide under the beds with our fingers in our ears to shut out the bird screams and die thud, thud of the turtles swimming in the boiling water, their shells hitting the sides of the pot. Once the third aunt who worked at the laundry ran out and bought us bags of candy to hold over our noses; my mother was dismembering skunk on the chopping block. I would smell the rubbery odor through the candy.
In a glass jar on a shelf my mother kept a big brown hand with pointed claws stewing in alcohol and herbs. She must have brought it from China because I do not remember a time when I did not have the hand to look at. She said it was a bear's claw, and for many years I thought bears were hairless. My mother used the tobacco, leeks, and grasses swimming about the hand to rub our sprains and bruises.
Just as I would climb up to the shelf to take one look after another at the hand, I would hear my mother's monkey story. I'd take my fingers out of my ears and let her monkey words enter my brain. I did not always listen voluntarily, though. She would begin telling the story, perhaps repeating it to a homesick villager, and I'd overhear before I had a chance to protect myself. Then the monkey words would unsettle me; a curtain flapped loose inside my brain. I have wanted to say, "Stop it. Stop it," but not once did I say, "Stop it."
"Do you know what people in China eat when they have the money?" my mother began. "They buy into a monkey feast. The eaters sit around a thick wood table with a hole in the middle. Boys bring in the monkey at the end of a pole. Its neck is in a collar at the end of the pole, and it is screaming. Its hands are tied behind it. They clamp the monkey into the table; the whole table fits like mother collar around its neck. Using a surgeon's saw, the cooks cut a clean line in a circle at the top of its head. To loosen the bone, they tap with a tiny hammer and wedge here and there with a silver pick. Then an old woman reaches out her hand to the monkey's face and up to its scalp, where she tufts some hairs and lifts off the lid of the skull. The eaters spoon out the brains."
Did she say, "You should have seen the faces the monkey made"? Did she say, "The people laughed at the monkey screaming"? It was alive? The curtain flaps closed like merciful black wings.
"Eat! Eat! " my mother would shout at our heads bent over bowls, the blood pudding awobble in the middle of the table.
She had one rule to keep us safe from toadstools and such: "If it tastes good, it's bad for you," she said. "If it tastes bad, it's good for you."
We'd have to face four- and five-day old leftovers until we ate it all. The squid eye would keep appearing at breakfast and dinner until eaten. Sometimes brown masses sat on every dish. I have seen revulsion on the faces of visitors who've caught us at meals.
"Have you eaten yet?" the Chinese greet one another.
"Yes, I have," they answer whether they have or not. "And you?"
I would live on plastic.
Maxine Hong Kingston
THE WOMAN WARRIOR
EXERCISES
1. Describe your mother's cooking, her attitude towards food, and its effect on you. Be specific and concrete. Perhaps you might want to concentrate on one particular meal, an imaginary event made up of all the real meals, cooked and served by your mother. By combining a variety ofdifferent elements from many occasions into a fictionalized meal, you are more likely to get at the essence of the subject than if you plod through being true to each historic fact.
2. Visualize your mother in the kitchen as she cooks and serves food. Compare this to the way you function in the kitchen.
II.
It was the anniversary
of bread
the bread-celebration
on that day everything was bread
mattresses pillows blankets chairs
windows
(wanting to look out, the child
chewed a hole in the bread pane)
the musicians played instruments of bread
the mayor unveiled
a bread monument
in honor of bread
People came from
every
comer of the republic
laughing and pushing, crowding in the streets
a busload of pickpockets emptied itself in the square
everyone wanted the bread
that thrust up on long stalks from the ground, or
hung down on strings from the sky
This bread was
of three kinds
yellow, with raisins
like little black buttons
or pink as the sunset
or white as a girl's veil
at her first communion
-it made no difference
the people ate it all
Riding out into
the dusk
the buses were filled with bread
the roads were lined with bread
the people waved
Goodbye, goodbye to the bread
they were chewing and laughing
in the deserted streets maybe one or two
were left lying asprawl
pillowed in a doorway, dead-drunk on bread
under stars clustered thick as raisins
Constance Urdang
A GEOGRAPHY OF POETS
Exercises
1. Celebrate food in a poem. Experiment with Constance Urdang's technique of using repetion and wild flights of the imagination to create a comic effect.
2. Write about making bread. Write about what the dough feels like in your hands, how it smells when it's baking, the effect it has on others when you give it to them warm from the oven.