Unni, Unni, Unni,
I should be sorry for being late. But let us keep it that way, I mean, stop being sorry for being late. Let us gently, slowly greet the winter.
Mooncakes filled with preservatives! You really don’t seem to like them, lol. Your description of mooncakes compared to dumplings made me laugh so hard. Maybe it’s because you get to eat them more often than I do. If you’re far away from something, you get to like it more easily. Maybe it’s just me.
For me, mooncakes taste like my town. My childhood house--my parents still live there--is in the center of downtown Uijeongbu which, in the early 2000s, was packed with nightclubs and pubs. In front of the house is the most popular Chinese restaurant in town; everytime I went to school in the morning, the Chinese owner cleaned the front yard with water. Whenever I said hi to him, calling him shūshu, he always waved the water hose, smiling back. In every Chuseok, he gave my mother some mooncakes, but my family always felt embarrassed; they never got used to the savor. But I loved them with milk: the crispy texture of the crust, the candy flavor inside. Maybe that’s where the preservatives work? Do you remember any specific kind of mooncakes? When did you feel most fed up with them? Did your grandmother also not like them?
The movie you talked about, that’s the one you recommended for the Kickstarter funding, right? Thanks to you, I got to try the Kickstarter for the first time. Soon after my donation, I heard about the military coup in Myanmar, which made me extremely worried about the movie as well as the director. I’m so happy to hear that the movie went through! It was kind of funny, you know, to imagine Phoe Htoo crawling into Ma Soe’s lap. You know, like, when you’re around ten, you’re still a baby, but then also a kid, and after a few years you would have to learn how things are more difficult in this world. When I was ten, I thought plunging myself into my mother’s lap was too childish. I have a younger brother, so I was busy pretending I was more of a grown-up. But then, I couldn’t resist it! So I came up with this game called, “the Ninja Turtles” game; we lined up--my mother, me, my brother--and hugged the person in front of each other, swaying our hips side to side for quite a while. Then my mother would thrust her hip, and we bounced to the front, Waaahing.
When we played this “Ninja Turtles” game, I didn’t have to look her in the face and I liked it. I get scared too easily, so I liked to read her face my own way. Sometimes, I felt I could see a collapsing building in her face. I used to hide in my mother’s back, as if that would really happen. My mother’s hip during the game always bounced a bit sooner, or later, than I expected. That sense of misreading, that comforted me.. Do you remember any specific facial expression of your mother? Or, did you have to dodge it, afraid of knowing it all already?
July
PS1. The next time we meet, we’re having dumplings, though we may have to wait long, even until after the Dragon Boat Festival.
PS2. I’ll definitely send you the English translation of Seul-ah Lee’s essays when it comes out. It’s going to be so fun. There’s also a story that goes, her mother and father started having sex on the bed, but they found themselves on the floor after climax. Would I be able to ask my mother about such things? Ah, hopefully in the next twenty years.
