Before I knew they were exotic, our neighbor’s wife made wontons. Fresh and ridiculous in our northern woods and tight log cabin. She folded and sorted and folded and pinched. Those wontons seemed, to me, like ruined cookies. They were treats that, like everything else she touched, were disfigured by her foreign hands. Wicked woman, nasty as her food. She smoked in our basement. She smelled like earth and rotting herbs. She boiled chicken’s feet and scolded with her choppy Chinese tongue.
That twitchy Mingya—she and her vile language were cut so thin, so impatient, so distrustful. And I was young and an outlet for her angst. She was mad, always so mad, cursing at her the children in Chinese, begging us to perform. She attacked house work as if it had insulted her. She couldn’t speak to us. She couldn’t walk with us. She wouldn’t sit with us. She squatted or chose the floor. She couldn’t understand the necessary separation between inside and outside in our frigid climate, always leaving windows open to the snow.
And I didn’t help her. She’d been the nanny from China but started fucking the boss…our neighbor. The wife eventually left. The nanny raised their adopted Korean girl and took up residence in the boss’ bed. The nanny was as old as the oldest son and I wondered if she wouldn’t prefer him.
I was 9 and younger and I remember Bob’s pride about Mingya, like every day he brought home the biggest kill, or landed the best account. He would look at her, as an owner does a car, and smile and speak his anglo Chinese and laugh with his chin thrust out and slap his knee because, to him, he was so funny. And Minya couldn’t even shop. I’d watch her fumble through the stores, not making sense of English words. She’s try to barter with shelf-stockers. She get lost between isles and struggle with the very vegetables she intended to roast. Finally, with pride, she’d haul what little she understood to the check out and pay with money she couldn’t count. Finally back at our house, she’d start the dough and chopping for her wontons.
In the kitchen, she could be quiet, stop yelling at us, demanding that we, as children of the northern Minnesota woods, acted more Chinese, more like the children she knew. And I could ignore her and hate her from anywhere in the house because the smell of chicken’s feet being boiled saturates everything. Nothing in our kitchen made sense. But she was obsessed with the wontons, with the folding, the sorting, the folding and the pinching. And would spend a day, a whole day, making these wontons, perfecting her exotic gift to a family that hadn’t ever heard of them.
I’ve brought you something new, she’d say. I would quietly tell my father, so that Mingya could hear, that I couldn’t eat her food because it was too awful. And I’d let her sit in a corner of that cabin, where no one spoke Chinese, and where the children thought her precious wontons were an accident.
April 3, 2008