Zongzi

Cynthia Lin

For zongzi, Grandma would start the night before. She would submerge dried bamboo leaves in a basin of cold water, cover it with a lid, and bring it to a slow boil over the stove. Out came the leaves, glistening and pliable. They would be left in lukewarm water, there to soak until morning. More water, as she washed the glutinous rice, swirling around the rice pieces until the water turned murky from starch.

She did this with the mung beans and peanuts, and then set them all aside in a wide bowl to soak. Grandma’s hands, usually dry and rough from dishwasher soap, were made soft and supple by the water. 

The next morning, Grandma would wake even earlier than usual. Grandpa, sleeping in the bottom bunk with her, blinked bleary eyes at her. “Keep an eye on the phone,” she said in Fuzhounese, a dialect from her hometown in Fuzhou, China. 

“It’s 4:00am,” Grandpa grumbled. 

“The kids are coming today. Watch yourself.” Grandma pulled a fitted quilted vest and a tight-fitting undershirt from the drawer beneath their bed. It was Christmas. Although there was no snow outside – there had not been a white Christmas in Brooklyn, New York since 2009 – it was cold enough that Uncle, who slept on the top bunk, had begun complaining about his aching arm. It was from an old injury. According to Ma, when Uncle was in his mid-twenties’, he’d been quite the daredevil. At the time, my grandparents and uncles and aunts had all lived in Fuzhou, a Southern coastal city in China known for their fish balls and Mao aficionados. Uncle would roar by on his pitch black motorcycle, eyes set on everything but the path ahead of him. They found him, hours later, bleeding out on the side of the road. Thirty years later and immigrated to a new country, he could still not lift that arm. 

Grandma threw up the vest and shirt. 

“Ma, it’s 4:00am.” Uncle’s voice came muffled from the top bunk. “They won’t get here until noon.” 

Grandma ignored him. She had experience with ignoring; she’d been ignoring Grandpa since their marriage fifty years ago. 

She headed out to the kitchen, which was connected to the bedroom. They shared it with two other families who’s bedrooms were also connected, although their neighbors always knew to steer clear of the kitchen come Christmas. 

Laid out on the counter were the soaking bamboo leaves, sweet rice, mung beans, and peanuts. Grandma poured out the water. Then wiped her hands on a rag and took out a bottle of sesame oil, and, after streaming the dark oil swiftly around a wide bowl, poured in the rice, salt, and soy sauce. She did the same for the mung beans and peanuts. Then set them all aside. Taking a soaking bamboo leaf, she dried and flattened it, and, after pausing for a moment, folded it into a cone-like pocket. She scooped in rice, mung beans, peanuts, a salted egg, and rice again. After covering the open top with another bamboo leaf, she wrapped it snug with a string until all the loose pieces were bound. She checked the time. Seeing that it was already 8:00am, she went to remind Grandpa and Uncle to watch their phones. 

—

The clean smell of steaming rice hit us first, mixing with the cigarette smoke wafting from the first floor. Grandma’s apartment was on the second floor of a cinder-block housing tower in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park in New York City. Ma, Ba, my older sister Christina, and I had come from our home in Southampton two hours away. 

Her building, one of many interchangeable public housing towers, had taken us almost an hour to find. You would think after ten years of Christmas visits we’d know, or that we’d written down the address, but Grandpa would always need to come down to greet us. 

Grandpa led us up the creaking stairs, his left leg twisting ever so slightly. He was never clear on how he got the injury – it was either from some war, some reckless accident, or from being an old man. 

Inside the apartment, steam swirled from a pot half the size of Grandma, who opened the lid and poked the contents – the zongzi – with her bare finger. She didn’t look small in the kitchen, although standing face to face, we could all see the tops of her unruly hair. Drying bamboo leaves, salted shrimp shells, the hard white ends of green onions, and the discarded styrofoam and plastic of frozen beef packages lay scattered about the counter. 

Grandma shooed me and Christina out of the kitchen. “Go rest, go rest!” she’d say, even though we’d been resting for two hours in the car. Inside Grandma’s bedroom – for it was undeniably Grandma’s bedroom – was everything she would ever need: a small Buddhist shrine with dying red candles, shoeboxes stuffed with sewing needles and medicine bottles, overflowing plastic bags pulled taut by the weight of Fay Da Bakery napkins which they used in lieu of toilet paper, pictures of her grandchildren covered in wrinkled saran wrap. There were no other photographs, and besides the clock, there was nothing except a day-by-day calendar on the wall. Grandma had sewn the sheafs of used-up days into a bound book. The blank back sides of the calendar were covered with slanted English handwriting. Phrases like “break a leg” and “getting a taste of your own medicine” were circled. After dinner, Grandma liked having her American granddaughters explain American idioms to her.  

Uncle, a tall man, sat compressed and uncomfortable on the bottom bunk. A package of dog toys were on his lap. By then, Christina was 17 and I was 14. We didn’t know how to tell Uncle that the presents he’d gotten for us were for dogs. 

“Chi fan le! Chi fan le!” Grandma’s pattering slippers stopped outside the bedroom door.  

In the kitchen, the adults – Grandma, Grandpa, Ma, Ba – had pushed two small tables together, one borrowed from a neighboring family. Dinner was translucent rice noodles and fish balls simmering in an oily broth, rabbit meat stewing in a cackling red sauce, an earthy soup tinged with the faint memory of winter melon and radishes, and sauteed shrimp still in their salty shells. We gorged ourselves. I loosened my pants within the half hour. Uncle sat back, dazed and short of breath, content and sleepy. 

“How come you don’t cook like this everyday?” Uncle said. 

“For you two?” Grandma scoffed. There was a sizable pause. 

Grandpa looked at Christina and  me. Then at Ma and Ba. “Eat more, eat more.” He placed a shrimp on my plate. 

– 

After dinner, everyone except for Grandma lolled about. Ma, Uncle, and Grandpa sipped on black tea and chattered. Ba was in the bedroom, sleeping off the heavy dinner and readying himself for the drive home. My sister and I watched Grandma pack away the zongzi in red plastic bags. 

It seemed like she was packing up half the food in the apartment. First, the leftover fish balls and winter melon soup in plastic quarts. Then, canned beans from the Senior Center and oranges and persimmons she had bought from the supermarket because “Chinatown fruits were cheaper and sweeter.” Chinese nonperishables: spicy dried squid and shitake mushrooms, yiner – snow fungus – and rousong – a cotton candy-esque dried pork. Bags of banana chips and sickenly sweet prunes my sister and I sampled until our bellies twisted. Jars of eye-watering Lao Gan Ma chili oil and toasted peanut sesame paste. Boxes of Choco Pies and Chrysanthemum juice boxes. All this, according to Grandpa, had been blessed prior to the Buddhist shrine. It had taken Grandma weeks in advance to get through all the food. 

Then came the miscellaneous items. Things that were commonplace for us but that Grandma thought were self-indulgences. Toothpastes, toilet paper, chapsticks, lotions. The toothpaste brand looked and sounded suspiciously like Sensodyne but was called “Sensitive.” 

“This is too much!” Ma protested. She was trying to take the zongzi out from the bags. “The kids won’t be able to finish all this! Save some for yourself.”

Grandma snatched the zongzi back. “I made them specifically for the kids.” She pointed at Grandpa and Uncle. “Those two don’t like eating them. Right?”

Uncle  nodded noncommittally. Grandpa looked tired. 

–

Grandma got her way. Ma and Ba and Christina hiked down the creaky stairs, hands full with red plastic bags. I held the door open. Ma made some half-hearted attempt to get Grandma and Grandpa to stay indoors, but they came out anyway. Inside the car, we were warm and pressed in on all sides by food.

“Go inside!” Ma shooed at Grandma. “We’re going!”

Grandma wore a fitted quilted vest over a tight-fitting undershirt. Everything about her was neat and self-contained. Behind her, the dim, winding street stretched wide and all-encompassing. There was a small plot of greenery encircled by a metal fence in front of the apartment building, one that I had never seen green. There, the other inhabitants had conveniently started a second garbage disposal pile. 

Grandma and Grandpa: two still, shadowy figures. As our car wound into a corner, Grandpa reached for Grandma’s hand. Grandma turned away.

We sped across the Brooklyn Bridge in the direction of Queens. I counted twelve tunnels before my eyelids shuttered. Faintly, in the background, I thought I heard Ma yelling and the returning cackle of a phone with a bad signal. By the time I awoke, we were back in Southampton. The car heaved to a gentle stop on our smooth blacktop driveway. It was a clear and starry night. I heard the sound of the wind. 

“Home sweet home,” Ma said. Like Grandma, she looked for every opportunity to use American idioms. 

–

We ate zongzi for breakfast, for lunch, as a snack, and for dinner. By the end of the first week, we still had ten or so left and had become so thoroughly sick of zongzi that the mere scent of steaming rice induced a gag reflex. Ma had just decided to throw away the rest of them when Grandma called. 

It was an early Monday morning, a little more than a week after Christmas. The sun had not yet risen, so it seemed like it was still yesterday. Outside, Ba was getting the car ready to drive us ten minutes away to our high school. 

In the kitchen, Christina microwaved a zongzi with a glass of water so that the rice wouldn’t dry out. She was determined to finish them all, although Ma told her that Grandma would never know anyway. I peeled and cut an apple. Ma was getting ready in the bathroom.

“You’re crazy,” Ma said in Fuzhounese. The sound of the microwave droned on. “Why do you always do this? Ma, it’s been over twenty years. Please. Just leave it alone.” 

I wandered into the bathroom. Ma gripped a toothbrush in one hand and a cup of water in another. Her head pressed the phone against her shoulder. 

Is everything okay? I mouthed. 

Ma grimaced. Outside, Ba beeped.

A few days later, after yet another argument on the phone with Grandma, Ma told me what had happened with Uncle and his limp arm. It wasn’t just the motorcycle accident, although that was what did it for Grandpa. He didn’t look like it now, Ma said, but a lifetime ago, Grandpa had powerful friends in China. He was close with the mayor of Fuzhou. At the time, mayors in China had immense bureaucratic power and very little restrictions. A Chinese man once told a Western observer, “I would rather be mayor in China than President of the United States.” This was good, as Grandpa’s eldest – Uncle – frequently got in trouble with the law. After the accident, Grandpa swore that that was the last time he would get Uncle out of a mess. Uncle promised he would do better, that he would stop hanging around with his “gang-like” friends, that he would study and get an education, and make it so that when Grandpa’s friends bragged about their eldest sons, Grandpa wouldn’t be embarrassed to do the same. 

“He’s reckless,” Grandma said. “He still hasn’t changed. I knew it the day he asked for a divorce. Have you seen his daughter? Crazy, messy, just like the mother, just like him.”

“Aya, watch your words,” Ma said tiredly. She was washing the dishes. 

“Your father said something to him today. I don’t know what, but your brother left and hasn’t been back. Those two. They’ve been like this since last year. I don’t know what to do.” 

–

The next day, we ate the last few zongzi for dinner. We never did have the heart to throw them away. Ma froze them so that they wouldn’t go bad, and we heated them over a stainless steel steamer until they were sticky. As Ma was wiping down the dining table, we got the call that Uncle was found by a friend of Grandpa’s wandering 56th Avenue, just a few blocks away from Grandma’s apartment. And, that he was currently in the hospital. He’d eaten something at some party he’d gone to shortly after storming off and now needed to be operated on. 

In the pictures Grandma sent, Uncle was shrunken. Over the years, he’d grown a paunch, but that was gone now. An electronic pump fed him liquids and medication. The first day, he’d barely been able to open his eyes, which were bruised shut with dark circles. The second day, when he regained his voice, he made a promise to Grandma and Grandpa that he would never do that again, that he would be more careful, that he would turn over a new leaf, and would look out for them now after all the years they spent taking care of him. Grandma started crying. Grandpa sat by Uncle’s bed and took his hand. 

Cynthia Lin is a student at Yale University.

ABOUT THE ART | Stasis by Alicia Gan, 2022. Alicia Gan is an artist from Irvine, California, and a student at Yale University. Her pieces combine Surrealist “dream-state” imagery with a realistic rendering style, investigating topics such as cultural identity and mythology. The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards has previously recognized her work on both a regional and national level.