SEAR — AMY WANG
/The stickiness of a six-table Korean barbeque restaurant is the only token of small-town solemnity that you can still hold onto, twenty years after you first moved away from home. The menu, clinging to your fingers as you flag down the waitress. The air, as you take deep breaths and wait for your father to come out of the restroom, where he has spent the last thirty minutes sitting in a daze. You tear the napkins into shreds, watch the salt flutter over the knots you’ve tied in the table cloth.
In the booth where your father’s shadow sits down to eat, the smell of burnt meat hangs sullen. As he picks at the chicken, you make a home of the silence in his throat, coaxing out his words and catching them before they can fall. No, baba. You cannot eat the moon. No, baba. You cannot fist my name and press it to your mouth, if only because the syllables feel foreign as they go down. No baba. Don’t touch that. You’ll burn your fingers. Chives, on table. Heat, caressing cheek. This place is familiar in all the wrong ways. Halfway through the meal you smile at your father’s attempts to pick up the shrimp with both hands and remember that once, he used to have control over all of his fingers. Once, when he still remembered how to, the two of you would sear teriyaki together, and laugh at the puns in the fortune cookies.
Tongs in weathered knuckles. Words rolling gingerly between teeth and tongue. As you eat, the taste of cast iron and burnt chopsticks is tender, like eyelids after sleep. Like the way his full name sounds as you say it to the lady at the front desk of the nursing home when you drop him off. Before she leads him away, you smile at him and he smiles at you, and his hand feels like the rind of an orange in yours as you let go of it.
In the parking lot, you come to a conclusion. Yes, you might be raw. But at least you’re not undercooked. This is not real barbecue, was what he said the first time you went to that restaurant together. Yes, you cannot speak your mother tongue, but at least you’re assimilated. Not real barbecue, but the best you can offer. The best you could do, on your own.
Amy Wang is a Chinese-American writer from California. Her poetry and fiction have been published in X-R-A-Y Lit, perhappened, Twin Pies Literary, and elsewhere. A high school sophomore, she enjoys reading and crying over fanfiction.
