The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [81]
Elliot looked confused for a moment. “Well, that’s awesome. You must be saving tons of money,” he said.
I told him about the Fall Harvest Feast I’d had with friends the week before.
“You must have gotten some practice,” he said, slathering a strip of turkey with gravy. “Everything is so good.”
“Oh, I definitely agree,” Zoe chimed in.
“Best Thanksgiving dinner ever,” Ellen said. Mouths full, everyone around the table nodded.
After a long, leisurely dinner we all retired to the living room to stretch out. Desserts wouldn’t come until later, when we had regained our appetites. So Ellen suggested a game of cards. My mother had a different idea.
“This!” she said, proudly holding a bright blue case of mah-jongg tiles. Recently purchased in Chinatown, the mah-jongg tiles had been bringing my mother back to her roots lately. I’d played the game a couple of times already with her; it was easy to pick up, and actually a lot like many Western card games, so long as you could differentiate the numbers and characters on the tiles. Mah-jongg was actually a lot like rummy. Players had sets of tiles before them, which they tried to group off into three of a kind or three in a row. We’d take turns picking up tiles from the table and discarding them. Once a tile was discarded on the table, the next player had the option of picking it up to complete a set—calling out ‘Pung!’ when this happened. And instead of saying “rummy,” when a player had a winning spread, he or she would call out “Hula!”
We pulled out a card table and gathered around it. My mother, Chris, and I were each seated at one of the sides of the table, and my aunt and cousin pulled their chairs close together and teamed up on the last. Mah-jongg is a four-person game, and the four sides of the table are thought to symbolize the four winds: north, south, east, and west. The familiar crackling sound as the plastic tiles were poured in the center and turned over one by one signaled the start of a long succession of games. After some pointers and practice rounds, Ellen and Phoebe were following just as well as the rest of us. At fourteen years of age, my cousin was downright scary-smart.
“Pung!” she cried, grabbing a tile that my mother had just placed on the table.
“That’s the second time I gave you pung,” my mom sighed.
The next day, after all our guests had left, my parents, Chris, and I drove to Jo-Jo’s apartment in Queens. We brought the mah-jongg tiles, as well as some makings for wontons. It would be a simple late lunch or early dinner, and a third Thanksgiving for me.
We sat around Gong-Gong’s easy chair in Jo-Jo’s apartment. My grandfather refused to eat most of the time, shaking his bony hand in protest when Jo-Jo tried to feed him. But whenever he tasted something good, I noticed he always let up a little. We had stuffed and folded the pork and shrimp wontons in the kitchen ourselves, with the help of Gong-Gong’s helper. “Auntie,” as we respectfully called her, had taught us the classic Shanghai style of folding the dumplings in square, store-bought egg-noodle wrappers. Once Gong-Gong accepted a spoonful of wonton in soup, he eagerly took another bite, and another.
We’d gone to Jo-Jo’s apartment to see Gong-Gong several times that fall, as his condition worsened. Since his hearing was so poor, at first Jo-Jo and my mom would communicate with him by writing on a dry-erase board in Chinese characters. “Do you want soup?” they might write, or more seriously, “Do you remember Wei Kai Lin?” (my Chinese name). After a while, it became less and less clear that he even remembered my mother anymore, and he couldn’t maintain the attention span to read writing.
My mother brought the mah-jongg tiles to play once again that evening. Once the tiles were poured onto the table with a familiar crackle, Gong-Gong perked up a bit. He eyed the tiles attentively as we pushed them around for a while. We didn’t end up playing a real game, but for the rest of the evening, as we sat around Jo-Jo’s apartment talking, my grandfather plunked and picked at