Chasing the Flavor
—Wu Guanzhong’s painting Bitter Melon Homestead
garden picking…
sun glitters
on veined hands
In 2008, I taught as a visiting scholar at a university in China. Tired of standing in line to buy lunch and eating in the cafeteria mingled with waves of delightful noises and tinkling of plates and bowls, I strolled down the hill to a roadside eatery, eager to find food triggering nostalgia. It was an itty-bitty place where you couldn’t turn around without bumping elbows. As I was unsure what to choose from a variety of dishes piling in the stainless-steel trays, I spotted a tray of sliced bitter melon stir-fried with eggs.
one big bite…
hunger growls louder
in the mind
When I was a little boy playing outside in summertime, I sweated a lot and always had prickly heat rash on my back. Grandma often applied cooling powder on the affected area to control irritation. She also cooked bitter melon, saying it would be the double solution to my suffering. After chewing a small slice, I would open my mouth to breathe out the bitterness and gulped down a glass of water to gargle it off tongue, but grandma always urged me to try one more.
memory…
a welcome doormat
for old days
Dream Food
The supreme egg fried rice is a kind of food that shows oneness with rice coated with egg yolk to awaken the tastebuds. To cook it, add egg yolks, salt, white pepper and oil to a bowl of steamed, nonstick rice and use a spoon to stir them well to coat every grain. The next step is to heat the wok on high, add oil and swirl it around the wok, and put rice in to stir-fry for one minute. When grains start popping in the heated wok, ladle them on a plate. That’s why it’s called Golden Fried Rice.
My grandma stir-fried my childhood with her cooking skills. A bound-footed woman who became a widow in her early twenties, she cooked eye-licious golden fried rice and wokcakes diced with green onion. Because eggs were rationed in the '60s, grandma could cook rice every two weeks. Each time she placed a large plate of rice on the table and spooned for each of us a small portion of it in a small double-happiness bowl. She said, “The best golden fried rice needs nothing else like green onion or peas or shrimp or pork or beef. They are embellishments that distract the flavor.” Grandma died in 1967, so did her golden fried rice.
lingering incense
soft moonshine
around her grave
The Rhythm of Time
retirement…
a shortcut
to second life
Do I feel the granularity of time gradually squeezed out of the mud of my mind, hear its consonance clicking second by second in the dead silence of night, or see its weariness hanging like a worn knapsack on a peg behind the creaking door? Each image is a graffiti of bygone years fading on the moldy wall of time.
shaving mirror…
a new look
of sunken cheeks
The hair of time has thinned into a bald spot on its head, its face has wrinkled like a dry sycamore bark too brittle to touch, its legs no longer negotiate well, each step wobbles like an overfed duck.
old age…
thick toilet paper
hard to dissolve
Aging never blinks when time burns its candle. As I am about to push the stop button on my commute, I feel the need to give my memory a second knock. How did I leave one place in search of another, how did I open my eyes to absorb the flat curiosity of the Delta land, how did its quiet simplicity, its warp-and-weft landscape of black and white, its whatever remain forlorn and cheerful to my sensibility? Maybe that’s my life in the wabi-sabi style.
empty campus
carillon follows
drifting clouds
To locals, the Mississippi Delta is tethered to agriculture and music. To an aging transplant, it has been a dreamland that spurs imagination to stretch into a passage of time flowing with vitality and harmony of life.
no longer 8-5
each day a new book
turned page by page
© 2026, All text by Jianqing Zheng
