Essential Labor by Angela Garbes

Author:Angela Garbes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

6

Mothering as Encouraging Appetites

As a kid, I padded into our yellow linoleum kitchen at all hours to take scoops of rice from the rice cooker that lived on the counter. I’d fill a bowl then pour patis and lemon juice over it, or soy sauce and lemon juice, depending on my mood, and eat it while sitting on the floor. My brothers used to yell at me for what they considered my highest crime, worse than being a tattletale: I’d beat them to a loaf of supermarket bakery French bread and dig out the squishy insides, which I’d chase with a shot of pickle juice straight from the jar. When they opened the paper bag, they’d find only a long, hollowed-out crust. I’d help myself to slices of Pepperidge Farm German Chocolate Cake, which my mom kept in its box in the freezer. I liked how, after eating approximately half the slices, the box had enough room to store the knife inside of it, where it would get finger-numbingly cold. My appetite has always felt outsized, and I’ve only ever wanted to indulge it.

Growing up, I noticed the food we ate was the product of a lot of work. Not only did it require ingredients that most people around me had never heard of, but those ingredients took a long time to cook. I was a small-town ’80s kid, growing up at a time when the “ethnic” aisle in the grocery store was stocked with little more than La Choy soy sauce and canned water chestnuts. I could never imagine I’d live where I do now, shopping at Fou Lee, Seafood City, Viet-Wah, Uwajimaya, 99 Ranch, and H Mart. Many pantry staples—fish sauce, fifty-pound bags of rice, bagoong, sotanghon noodles, cane vinegar—were procured in Chinatown when we visited my Tita Fe in New York City. I remember my dad loading the hefty woven sacks of rice into the back of our van. When we arrived home, he would cut open a sack with a steak knife, flip it over, and pour its contents into our green rice dispenser, a three-foot-tall item I was oddly proud of our owning. It dispensed rice in three-cup increments with just the push of a finger.

We also ate a fair amount of canned corned beef in those days, but all the important food—the food my parents liked the most, the food we ate on special occasions, or the nights when my mom was home from work early—was Filipino. Pinakbet, munggo, adobo—dishes that required time to poach and shred chicken, braise pork belly, or chop small mountains of vegetables. For bulalo and sinigang and kare kare, we needed hours to braise pork neck bones and oxtails. When she made lumpia and pancit, typically for parties and gatherings, my mother would pull out gallon containers of Wesson oil and two electric woks and turn what seemed like laundry baskets of noodles using all her arm strength. Instead of our usual white six-cup rice cooker, she’d get out the fancy cream-colored ten-cupper with the built-in lid and decorative pastel flowers.

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