He Claimed
He claimed he
came from a semi- tropical place where radios grew on trees, tuned to different
stations, and bickered in village dialect. The music scratched the walls of the
brick houses, alarming the roaming pigs in the village yards.
Steeped in mud,
the ancestral land mud sent flying by the oxcart.
The boy that was
manchild apprenticed to be a chef, exotic dishes grew like papayas in his mind.
All life he had this good point for his friends – you will be fed, and
copiously as the summer is humid.
He told us the
steam rising from his pots was the same steam that lifted from river mouths
after monsoon, that each broth carried a little quarrel of the old radios, a
little complaint from the pigs, a little mud from the oxcart’s wheel.
He chopped ginger
as if clearing a footpath back to his childhood. He salted fish as if blessing
the stubborn ancestors. He stirred coconut milk until it shone like the
forehead of a boy running home with a stolen mango.
And when he fed
us— late nights, early mornings, whenever sorrow knocked too loudly— he said
nothing ceremonial, only placed the bowls before us as if placing small
countries we could inhabit for a moment.
In each dish he
returned to that semi-tropical place where radios grew on trees, and we,
tasting, believed him.
Koon Woon
July, 2026
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