Tag: rice

folklore

listen, a bowl of raw rice mixed with salt keeps the slighted spirits away, or the unsavoury sort of ancestor, the kind that raped himself into the family tree, and if you’re living in lean times save the rice grains and bribe the local Tom to wait at the door

forgo the pedigrees, the Siberian, Norwegian, Persian!

listen, Filipino cats are good Christians and dutiful, they’ll trick the devil, and if the devil comes to your doorstep, the cat is your sentinel, all riddle speech and slight of paw-

you can enter if you count all the hairs on my body

and when the cat won’t freeze for the fur count,

the lore demands Satan seeks souls elsewhere, perhaps in a household that keeps dogs-

you’ve got cats, of course you do, you’re single and forty and therefore an unquantifiable threat and yes you could manage the devil yourself, haven’t you always sorted these things out? You could coax the tuxedo to the window,

place the calico at the door.

today you’re wanting white rice, and you’ll share some with the errant spirits because life is hard on any astral plane, besides you’ll all feel better for some fat rice, high GI short grain or jasmine, soft grain clouds, starch bowls that feel like love instead of satiety, and this is what you think love is,

carbs that switch to sugar and nestle in the forever belly, and

when you lived with your aunt who was not really your aunt but your mother’s lover, the rice cooker sat pride of place, electronic hearth, and heart

and that night before your mother took you to the Philippines to murder your stepfather’s girlfriend, you ate at the Australian Chinese take away that sold crinkled McCains Frozen chips deep fried in lukewarm oil, but you chose the egg fried rice with salted ham and tinned corn and peas, because your mother was too livid to cook, and you were eleven and this counted as a treat in a regional Australian town.

Fat Rice (non-fiction in progress)

I am craving white rice.

Fatty rice. Fat rice.

Happy rice.

High GI magic filled with carbohydrates and calories and sugar. When we lived with my aunt who was not really my aunt but your lover, there was always a pot of cooked rice. There is a joke circling the internet currently, an Asian man runs out of rice and though there is other food to eat, he has failed his family.

Despite countless diets, low carb, high protein, low fat, it is white rice that spreads inside me like a warm hug. The hipster European in me says eat the brown rice, the quinoa, the zucchini noodles. But white rice feels like home.

Fear and guilt also feel like home, but these days I’m all for harm minimisation. This is what I’ve learned after years of therapy, after training as a therapist myself. Eat the fatty rice.

….And about potatoes, and meat.

When I was a child, I thought that potatoes were an expensive food. You rarely bought them. On those rare occasions that you did buy them, you would buy a single potato, chopping it finely to put it in a casserole dish. Or there would be mashed potatoes, a treat and not a staple side dish. It didn’t occur to me that potatoes were not a Filipino staple.

I always liked vegetables and rice, a symbol of poverty in the Philippines. And yes I liked meat that didn’t taste like meat. I remember watching you fry bloodied meat or boil pink chicken legs with blue veins turning black in the boiling pot. It seemed counter-intuitive to eat what was once alive. Perhaps these thoughts are a mark of my privilege. When you are hungry, you will eat anything that is edible, and things that are also inedible.

These days I am vegan, another choice that might leave you aghast.

Children can be disappointing, one of my colleagues told me.

Excerpt from “A debt that cannot be repaid.”