Recipe for Boys Named Stanford, Duke, and Berkeley

Abstract

Recipe for Boys Named Stanford, Duke, and Berkeley Dorothy Chan (bio) I like boys who are named after prestigious schools: Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, or maybe even Yale,if your parents are super explicit about your dreams, and let's go bulldog, bulldog, bulldog—I think back tothree-year-old me wearing a UCLA t-shirt, gazing into a mirror in my family's Hong Kong penthouse, frommy father's hard-earned-self-made-salt-of-the-earth money, it's 1993, and I hear my older brother crying to my father, in the other room, over his poor grades, and before you know it, it's one year later, and we're ona plane to America, and my brother finishes high school in Pennsylvania, because doctors and engineers aren'tmade from poor grades, and my father gave it all up: the home with a view in Kowloon, the car, the job—my mother's happiness—all for my brother to have a future, and I like boys who are named after prestigious schools: Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, and you know it, Yale, because when you're a child of Chinese parentswho moved to America for you, it's Ivy League or else, and I think of my father who grew up eatingsoy sauce on days old rice, looking out the window: Hong Kong in the '50s, his game of watching the carsdrive past and writing down their license plates, adding them up, and when I'm five, I start spending my summers learning advanced math when my father's at work, my mother's at home teaching me instead ofgoing to the pool, and back in Hong Kong in the '50s, my father looks out the window and his pet goose arrives,and in PA in the '90s, my parents and I spend Saturdays at the park feeding the ducks, then going home tomy mother's turnip cakes as an afternoon snack: my brother prefers them boiled and I prefer them fried, [End Page 49] Hong Kong dim sum style: sautéyour preserved meat, black mushroom,and half of your dried shrimpswith two tablespoons of oil. Skin turnips,wash, and shred. Add a cup of water to cookfor twenty minutes as turnips tender. Mix cornflourand rice flour with three cups of water(including water where the turnips were cooked). Mix turnip, seasoning, preserved meat,black mushroom, dried shrimps, rice flour, and cornflour.Keep stirring while cooking until the mixture turnsinto a paste. Pour paste into a greased bowland smooth the surface. Sprinkle with dried shrimpsand steam for an hour. Add parsley and spring onionand steam for another two minutes.Slice when cool and serve. Enjoy. And how I enjoyed those Saturdays of sitting in boats at the park, ducks swimming after us, after our bread,my mother and father talking in Cantonese, reminiscing on times when neither one of themcould boil water, reminiscing on the time they first moved to America, thinking peanut butter and jellywas some gourmet dish, and I like boys who are named after prestigious schools: Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, and of course, Yale, because my father still has those photos of toddler me in Hong Kong, wearingmy UCLA t-shirt in our Kowloon penthouse, drawing and stamping on the walls, throwingplastic toys against the window, and I always wonder what would have been if we had never left: the missedpeanut butter and jelly sandwiches and trips to the park and the taste of Hong Kong in a turnip cake in PA. [End Page 50] Dorothy Chan Dorothy Chan is the author of Chinese Girl Strikes Back (Spork Press, forthcoming), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, March 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She is a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University, a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor...