Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Author:Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Kaong

Elephant ear plants—as big as a car door—press to the ground. Press, shimmy, and press again to the ground as they wait for afternoon rains. Press, shimmy, press. I’m here in Singapore as a visiting poet for a local university, and I’ve brought my mother along so she could see the famed botanical gardens and cloud forest.

One of the trees we saw in abundance there was the sugar palm tree, known for many as the Tree of Hope; not only can you make so many products from it—furniture, baskets, wood floors, flour, and even bread from the inner pith—but for riparian communities in Asia, sugar palm trees are vital. At about sixty-five feet tall, sugar palms are a huge slope stabilizer for riverbanks during heavy rains and wind, and they help prevent precious soil from being washed away thanks to their fingerlike roots holding fast and steady in a storm.

The fruit of the sugar palm is called kaong, a treasure of Filipino fruit salads and one of my favorite ingredients in halo-halo. Encased in a green baseball-size seed covering are three or four kaong fruits. You can eat them raw, but I love them boiled in a sugar syrup, glazed and glistening like polished pieces of milky quartz. When I eat halo-halo, I save each translucent paper clip–size piece for last because I love their sticky, chewy texture, especially when they are chilled from being surrounded by powdered ice.

On one of my off days, we dined at Plaza Singapura, a giant mall set right in the jeweled heart of the shopping district. At lunchtime, a little girl of about five or six, with jet-black bangs cut straight across her eyebrows, ran away from her own birthday party and into the mall. We were more than halfway through our meal when she came running back, breathless, clearly lost and looking for her parents. She ran right to our table and asked me how to get back to her party. While I walked her around the restaurant, looking for a manager, she told me unbidden and matter-of-factly that she had no favorite color. None at all. I’d never heard such a thing—not having a favorite color, especially for a child! In giant ceramic containers, aranda orchids held up five petals in a tired wave at us.

Turns out, after walking all over the mall—past the perfume counters and the free hand massage stations and the tea shops—the little girl’s birthday party was just in the back corner of our same restaurant. Even though their kid was missing for almost half an hour, the parents didn’t say thank you. Even frowned a bit when I brought her back to them.

After a gorgeous and humid morning at the orchid gardens, my mother and I were planning to have halo-halo for dessert before this drama of the missing birthday girl, and well—what’s better after a long day in the stickiness of the outdoors than ice-cold kaong sinking in halo-halo ice? Halo-halo is surely the coldest thing in this whole country—cold as a toucan would be in the arctic with a mouth full of guava.

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