Yuning "Anona" Yang

2022/05/03

I haven’t cooked for myself in a long time.

When I was in middle school, my mother asked me to learn to cook with her every weekend, hoping that I wouldn’t starve to death in the future. Start from scratch, wash the vegetables, chop them, and finally cook them, all on my own. Two dishes per week. I am actually very afraid of knives, especially the heavy rectangular kitchen knives at home.

The cylindrical wooden handle is attached to the iron alloy blade, and when my hand is holding at the junction, it looks like a kitten’s tiny paw. There are water stains and red metal rust in irregular shapes near the spine of the knife. The thick spine of the knife gradually approaches from both sides and gathers into a sharp edge, which is shiny white because of the friction all the year round. I feel scared whenever the reflection of light from the long, sharp and thin blade pours into my eyes. Just looking at it, I can’t help but imagine it rubbing the delicate skin of my fingers. In an instant, red blood beads ooze out, and sharp pains slowly and continuously traveled down my nerves to the brain. This is not the end, after putting on the Band-Aid, it will start to hurt as if water accidentally runs through the wound. The pain is not completely over until two or three days have passed and the wound is finally closed, leaving a small light brown trace on the skin.

I have seen my grandma cutting vegetables several times, when she had suddenly put down the knife, turned around and hurriedly walked to the living room with her fingers branched out, opened the cabinet and pulled out the Band-Aid. I had tilted my head to look at her from the door of my bedroom, and asked her if she was okay, if she needed any help, she had always said no, but the irregular shape of redness on her hand was like a blood moon in the sky, staring at me from a distance, and my fingers just started to hurt. Then I would see my grandma with her reading glasses on, squinting and carefully tearing open the Band-Aid package, carefully covering the edge of the wound, and sticking it in place. The brown Band-Aid had formed a circle around her finger, and looked like an antique thumb ring.

Knowing that I am afraid of knives, I take extra care every time I cut vegetables. So from the beginning of learning to cook until now, I haven’t really cut my fingers. The only time was when I cut it on my nails a few weeks ago, when I was worrying about my coming spring break trip to California. The edge of the knife slanted and cut through the edge of my left index finger nail, exactly where the nail should be cut  (I haven’t cut my nails for weeks). I ignored it until two days later when I noticed that it frequently caught my sweater in wool clumps so I just cut my nails along with it.

Unlike normal kitchen killers, I learned to cook fairly quick. For me, when the oil splashing out of the pan was no longer a scary monster, I just need to remember seasonings in the recipe, when should I put them in, and when the vegetables and meat are considered cooked and ready to eat, cooking is just easy. So if there is an accident when I am cooking, it is usually when I cover the pan with its lid and let it simmer, I get lazy and leave the pan behind to do something else, causing the water to boil dry and then the pan burns. I just always forget things behind. The only exception was when I first used flour. Chinese people especially like thickening in cooking. At that time, I didn’t know what thickening was. I just remembered that my grandma wrapped eggplant in flour and fried it, which is called eggplant box. I liked it very much and wanted to try it.

I don’t remember why I didn’t find the recipe on the Internet before I started, but by the time I poured out a bowl of flour, there was no stopping the end of the world. The ratio of water and flour is difficult to balance, at the beginning the water added was less than needed and I couldn’t stir the flour well, and when I added water into the flour it turned into some kind of a flour soup, repeated several times, when my mother found what I was doing, it had become a lot of flour and a lot of water in an unknown composition. My mother had to let me put this bowl of flour soup directly into the pan with the chopped eggplant. So at the end we didn’t get any eggplant box, and we didn’t cook rice either. The family ate eggplant mixed with flour for that lunch. My father, who rarely eat rice or any other carbohydrates, said, “After eating so much of your eggplant, we already paid a lot of respect for the dish, let’s put it away and eat something edible first.”

Later, when I went to high school, I lived on campus and was busy with my schoolwork. When I came home on weekends, my mother occasionally asked me to cook, and I always rejected because it took so much time away from my studying. Later, my mother tried to ask me to cook during the holidays to earn my pocket money. Counting the required days every week was just like completing some kinds of KPI. It was so annoying. Over time, I developed an aversion to cooking.

So after the two years of pandemic, when I finally got to live in a dorm that has a kitchen in it, I didn’t plan to cook at all. After all, even if I really want to cook, it takes at least an hour before I can eat. If I am really hungry, there’s no point in waiting for that. Moreover, it is really convenient to eat in the dining hall on the way home after class. Only at the beginning of the semester, my roommate and I bought all the pans and pots and the usual seasonings we need, as if we would certainly use all of them. And in fact, it was only the saucepan that stayed outside the cabinet most of the times, since my roommate likes instant noodles so much.

I used to like instant noodles too. During the pandemic I always had to wait for synchronous lectures at 3 or 4 A.M. and it was really easy to get hungry at night. I didn’t want to spend time cooking so I just heat the instant noodles with a bowl of hot water covered with a lid for a few minutes, so that the noodles tasted chewy. My roommate tried to persuade me that soft noodles cooked by the saucepan taste better but she never succeeded. She just didn’t know how many times I had this same argument with my dad. But when I stayed up till the morning until my dad woke up for work, I’d like to wait for him to cook two packs of instant noodles by saucepan and have breakfast with him.

My dad is an expert with instant noodles, though he was the only person in my family who didn’t know how to cook dishes. He went to Beijing for work and lived alone for years after I was born, and he had to deal with his meals every day on his own. Except buying cooked foods from the hospital canteen, he ate instant noodles most of the times (and I really wondered why he still likes it so much). I remembered once my mom and I visited him during my summer vacation, and found out a whole table of instant noodle packages in the living room. I believed that my dad surely had developed some secret skills with cooking instant noodles over those years.

There were always two well-heated soft-hearted eggs on the top of  noodles when my dad put the saucepan on the table. My dad and I just love eggs. My grandma always teased me when I asked her to add more eggs into dishes that I was like my dad. We both love eating eggs, and both are smart for eating too many eggs. I would use a spoon to eat one of the eggs and leave the pan for my dad to finish his share first. After he finished and left for work, I would enjoy my share watching him riding away at the window. There were always proper amount of salt added, which was a bit more for me, and a bit less for my dad. On weekend mornings, my dad would cook two saucepans with different amounts of salt added, and watch with animation while we ate.

But it was still rare for the soft instant noodles to appear in my life, during the pandemic I had to heat chewy ones myself or heat some dishes my mom prepared for me before she went to sleep. Nights were really long, too long to let me really enjoy delicious food, especially when I was alone in the darkness. And I was always too restless with my homework that were approaching deadlines, or got too lazy and waited until minutes before the start of class to get my “lunch”. So I just rushed with all the cooking steps, anything edible satisfied me.

Before my mother went to bed, she would turn off all the lights outside my room, so when I opened my door after the 12 P.M. class, all I saw in the living room was pitch black. There was a table lamp with white light at where the kettle was placed. Every time I heat the instant noodles, I would turn it on. The white light softly enveloped a spherical light zone around me. It was bright in front of my eyes, but a little further out the surroundings were still shrouded in darkness. I would lean against the wall and looked out the window in the dim light, and occasionally I happened to see a light on the opposite residential building go out. The city was falling asleep, time was stagnant, but I stayed awake. The absolute silence around me always made me feel that the world had been destroyed, leaving me alone to live stubbornly. The boundless loneliness wrapped me around and I couldn’t break through. Only sporadic motor noise of the cars driving by reminded me that the world was not static. After Athena, my cat, came to our house, I felt so much better. She would accompany me during classes, run around when I opened the door, and meowed at my feet while I was waiting for instant noodles.

When I was finally back to normal schedules and canteens that have cooked foods, it was really enough, and I just abandoned the kitchen, ignoring how much money I actually paid NYU for the dorm (and rationally speaking I should have taken full use of the kitchen). Things could have gone on like this until winter vacation, when my roommate tested positive for the Covid and went out for isolation, and I had to get tested too. When the results were not ready, I couldn’t go out. I was tired with take-out those days and the canteens were close during the vacation, while my roommate left me some meat in the refrigerator, so I ordered groceries, including a tomato, a cauliflower, two potatoes, and a few small boxes of meat, hoping to eat something different and delicious.

That afternoon, I played an episode of a radio play and began to wash vegetables. I was alone in the dorm, and the afternoon sunshine looked dazzling outside the window that it felt pretty warm from inside, even though it should have been cold. It was winter after all. So, slowly and methodically following some recipes that still left in my brain, I cooked a tomato and a cauliflower. After adding water and seasoning to the pan, I put the lid on and stood by, laughing with all kinds of cute jokes in the radio play. The sunshine pierced through the window and reflected on the white surface of the refrigerator, just like the weekend mornings when I waited for my dad’s noodles aside the refrigerator at home. A few minutes later, I realized that I added too much water, so I changed my mind to make a soup and added a few pieces of bacon. In the end, there were red, pink and white colors in the pan, just like a hot pot. It looked good and tasted okay. I took a picture and sent it to my parents.

Since then, cooking while listening to the radio play has become one of the happiest part of my day.