Tiny Moons - Nina Mingya Powles

TINY MOONS

OTHER TITLES FROM THE EMMA PRESS

POETRYPAMPHLETS

Elastic Glue, by Kathy Pimlott

Dear Friend(s), by Jeffery Sugarman

Poacher, by Lenni Sanders

priced out, by Conor Cleary

The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher, by Dawn Watson

A warm and snouting thing, by Ramona Herdman

SHORTSTORIES

First fox, by Leanne Radojkovich

Postcard Stories, by Jan Carson

The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna

Once Upon A Time In Birmingham, by Louise Palfreyman

POETRYANTHOLOGIES

In Transit: Poems of Travel

Second Place Rosette: Poems about Britain

Everything That Can Happen: Poems about the Future

The Emma Press Anthology of Contemoprary Gothic Verse

BOOKSFORCHILDREN

The Girl Who Learned All the Languages Of The World, by Ieva Flamingo

Hungry Girls

A pair of pink plastic chopsticks. A bowl full of instant noodles. The smell of chicken stock and jasmine tea. Steam starts to tickle my nose. Popo, my grandmother, watches me from her lacquered chair.

This is one of my very early memories, where the shapes are blurred and colours flare out in waves. Pink and yellow plastic, deep blue Tibetan carpet. I don’t know if all the parts are real, but I do know what happened next. When no one was looking, I flipped the bowl. The rim hit the table with a clatter, flinging out noodles and sending my chopsticks onto the floor. My mother shouted Aiyah! as I knew she would. But in the memory-dream, Popo doesn’t move. She sits still, watching me.

I only wanted to make a mess, but I think this might have been my first act of rebellion. No more chopsticks. No more noodles, at least not today.

This was short-lived, of course. I ate noodles willingly nearly every day growing up, so much so that they were known as Nina Noodles at my aunt and uncle’s house.

But there came a time, when I was about five, when I started to hate my weekend Chinese classes. I had bad dreams about the red and gold banners strung across the doorways and the high-pitched songs they made us sing. None of the other kids looked like me. None of their dads looked like mine. The languages and dialects they spoke with their parents sounded familiar to me, and I recognised a few words, but I wasn’t able to join in. I stopped attending the classes. Eventually my mother stopped using Chinese at home, or maybe I just stopped listening. Words vanished, along with the sounds.

ming明 / a sun日next to a moon月

ya 雅 / a tooth牙next to a bird隹

Big hips, brown eyes, and brown hair that turns lighter during a Aotearoa New Zealand summer. The way I look means that people can’t usually tell that I’m half Malaysian-Chinese. The way I look has given me enormous privilege my whole life, in a series of predominantly pakeha1 spaces: a white school, white university (in the English and Creative Writing departments at least), white suburb, white poetry readings. It means I can lie when a guy approaches me in a bar to say he really likes mixed girls and asks, ‘Can I guess your ethnicity?’ It makes it easy for some white people to see me as the same as them.

My grandfather, Gung Gung, picked my Chinese name when I was born. It’s also my middle name: 明雅, Mingya, meaning something like ‘bright elegance’. I only really learned to say it correctly when I was seventeen (rising tone, falling-rising tone) and only learned how to write the characters when I was twenty, after years of ducking out of the classroom game of what’s-your-middle-name, muttering ‘Never mind, it’s Chinese’, as if that were the same as not having one at all.

I starved myself of language, but I couldn’t starve myself of other things. Wonton noodle soup, Cantonese roast duck, my mother’s crispy egg noodles and her special congee. All the thick, sweet smells of yum cha restaurants my parents took me to, ordering all the same dishes every time, ever since I was born. I remember peeling pieces of rice paper from steaming charsiu bao and scrunching them into paper flowers. I remember drawing one of the few Chinese characters I knew on the steamed-up glass with my finger: 米, mi, the character for rice, like an open flower or a six-point star.

We moved to Shanghai when I was twelve, and I encountered a whole new landscape of sound: voices chattering in rising-falling waves, chaotic but familiar. I built myself a new home with new colours, new friends, and new foods: mooncakes, sesame pancakes, fried aubergine, black tea, and dumplings.

To remember, to re-member. Remembering as the opposite of dismembering. To put something back together again. A sun next to a moon, a tooth next to a bird.

I taught myself to cook around the same time I decided to take Chinese as one of my subject majors at university back in Wellington, along with English Literature. I was hungry to create, to make things with my hands, to relearn and recover what I’d lost.

Xu Ayi, our family’s housekeeper in Shanghai, had written down her recipe for jiaozi, dumplings, and given it to my mother. My mother translated it into English and copied it carefully into her cut-and-paste recipe book made of scraps of newspaper and magazines. I used this recipe in my Kelburn student flat, trying out different fillings depending on which vegetables were cheapest at the market: spinach instead of Chinese cabbage, spring onions instead of chives. I researched all the different ways of making cong youbing, spring onion pancakes, and combined them into my own method, kneading and folding the dough early in the morning before class so it would be ready to fry that night.

When she was younger, Popo was a brilliant cook. The kitchen was hers and hers alone. She always had something cooking, some soup or congee made from the bones of last night’s meat. I can’t speak Hakka, the Chinese dialect my mother’s family speak at home, so I only had simple conversations with her, in a mix of Mandarin and English, before her health deteriorated and speech wasn’t really possible anymore. I wish I had thought to ask: what’s your favourite dish to cook? Which flavours remind you of when you were little? What did your mother teach you?

On a visit to Malaysia a few years ago, the last time Popo was healthy and lucid enough to talk with us, my mother acting as translator as usual, I asked for the recipe of her chicken and aubergine curry. It was years since she last cooked but still she knew it by heart. After dinner, the three of us sat round the table: Popo explaining the steps in Hakka, Mum translating into English, me writing everything down. In the background I could hear Gung Gung watching a Cantonese soap opera upstairs and the soft clicking of moths and mosquitoes flying at the netted windows.

When I last saw her, six months before she passed away, Popo could never remember whether she’d turned the light off in the upstairs rooms, going back to check again and again. She couldn’t remember if she’d offered you a napkin, so she’d offer you another and another. But some things are harder to forget.

女 (woman, feminine): I see a curved standstill / a breath being held in /

It is tiring to be a woman who loves to eat in a society where hunger is something not to be satisfied but controlled. Where a long history of female hunger is associated with shame and madness. The body must be punished for every misstep; for every “indulgence” the balance of control must be restored. To enjoy food as a young woman, to opt out every day from the guilt expected of me, is a radical act, of love. My body often feels like it’s neither here nor there. Too much like this, not enough like that. But however it looks, my body allows me to feel hunger.

We must have been fourteen or fifteen, eating burgers at our favourite expat American diner in Shanghai, licking salt and ketchup off our fingers. We were best friends: two half-Chinese girls, one with hair darker than the other, one a little taller, both with our nails painted black. An older white man came up close to our table. ‘You two must be hungry girls,’ he said, raising an eyebrow and walking on. We stared after him, mouthed What the f*ck. Then we looked at each other and started to laugh because we didn’t know what he meant exactly, only that it was true.

I’ve been learning Mandarin for over three years now but there are still days when language fails me, when food feels like the only thing I have to tie me to this other home my family brought to me from far away.

There are things that pass from one hand to another, from mothers to daughters, from sister to sister, between cousins, between friends. A hot curry puff fresh from the oven, a secret batter recipe, a special technique for slicing mango.

One day I tried making Popo’s curry in my flat in Wellington. I read all the ingredient labels of all the curry powders in the supermarket to find the closest match: coriander seeds, cumin, fennel, chilli, turmeric, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, cardamom. The richly-scented list repeated like an incantation in my head. I bought fresh roti canai from Kelburn Parade and carried it home through a southerly storm. The curry turned out badly: watery, flavourless, the aubergine overcooked. But for a while my little kitchen smelled like cumin and coconut and crushed ginger. Like running in from the tropical rain, like Popo ladling rice into our bowls, like the lit mosquito coil and the flame lighting up my mother’s hands as she carries it towards me. These things I don’t need language to understand.

1 New Zealanders of European descent

WINTER

season of baby mandarins, apples

Pan-fried Dumplings

锅贴

On a Saturday morning I wait in line at my local Yang’s Dumplings, just down the road from my university in Shanghai. The air smells of hot oil and toasted sesame seeds. I watch clouds of steam collect near the ceiling. As the lunch rush approaches, noise builds in the food court.

The regulars and the serving staff are used to me by now. Only a few older aunties stare at me, and when I smile back at them they look away, amused. A little boy waiting in line behind me bumps my hip and his father apologises in English, embarrassed. ‘Mei guanxi,’ I reply – no worries

Tiny Moons - Nina Mingya Powles - E-Book (2024)

OTHER TITLES FROM THE EMMA PRESS

CONTENTS

Hungry Girls

WINTER

Pan-fried Dumplings