From my illustrated essay, The Biggest Dream, for Chickpea Magazine
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
An image of my essay, “The Biggest Dream,” for Issue 38 of Chickpea Magazine
An image of my essay, “The Biggest Dream,” for Issue 38 of Chickpea Magazine
For Issue 38: Ease of Chickpea Magazine, I wrote about meal preparation as an act of love and care, especially among immigrant and first-generation families—and in my own, as I’ve known it.
I think about food like I think about most things: pragmatically. I always liked to eat and cook, but that’s evaporated since becoming a mother. Now, meals feel overwhelming: a neverending physically-and-mentally taxing chore necessary for nourishing my young family. I’ve resented this task for who I believe it asks me to be: a devoted mother who easily slaps together healthy, delicious meals without stress or sweat—not because I don’t want to be this person, but because repeatedly, I’ve failed at actually becoming her.
I first spoke to Cara, the editor of Chickpea Magazine about this piece because I was interested in exploring the perception of care. A single act of love can communicate a wildly different message to the recipient than the message the giver intended to relay; our culture, environment, and personal histories all factor into how we give, perceive, and receive care. For many first generation children, care is not easy to receive. It takes a good deal of work to crack ourselves open enough to even see that it’s there.
In this essay, I look back on my last pregnancy, which I carried while finishing my final year of graduate school at Washington University. I explore the inevitable clash of multiple generations and cultures living under one roof; parental love shown through the monotony of meal planning, grocery shopping, meal preparation; and how food saves us in the places where, often, language fails.
This was also the first time I drew my father, pictured here making granola with N, while me and F (in my belly!) talk to my mom, who is, of course, of course…making chai.
I grimace, almost daily, about my kitchen: it is small, dim, and feels crowded if there are more than two people in it. The magic of drawing is it allows me to see what my eyes cannot: the walls that opened up to let my family grow; the hundred-year-old bricks that still stand strong; the love and care blooming in this tiny kitchen that is, for now, just the right size.
You can read “The Biggest Dream” in its entirety in Issue 38: Ease of Chickpea Magazine. Many thanks to Cara for the opportunity.
TUESDAY
I finished Laurie Frankel’s Family Family, which I loved, and can’t wait to read the rest of her work. I wrote about This is How it Always Is in a previous letter (“Tiny miracles everywhere,” see below) and will read The Atlas of Love next.
I finished Happiness Falls by Angie Kim and am amazed at how well her brain works.
I’m also reading Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll, which I am frightened by and want to put down—but I read on because of Knoll’s sharp, intelligent writing, and the truth it exposes about living as a woman, especially in America.
WEDNESDAY
To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness will find banks full of roses under my cypresses. —Friedrich Nietzsche
THURSDAY
I’m still thinking about these gorgeous sketches by Winsor Kinkade and the art of American illustrator Alan E. Cober, which I only discovered because he did the cover art for this thrifted copy of The Sword in The Stone that I’ve had on my dresser for over a decade. Illustrator Fatmia Ordinola’s work is lush and makes me feel the way it looks: vibrant, buzzing.
FRIDAY
Imagine:
I stop running when I’m tired. Imagine:
There’s still the month of June. Tell me,
what op-ed will grant the dead their dying?
What editor? What red-line? What pocket?
What earth. What shake. What silence.
—from Hala Alyan’s Naturalized
See you next week,
M
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