The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [38]
I lie to myself like no one else can. I always know what I need to hear. What else am I to do, revert to the truth and admit that I am a twenty-six-year-old man who still clings to the hope that someday his scholar-prince will come? Will hear my song floating over a misty lake, fall in love with my voice before ever laying eyes on my face. Will rescue me from my life of drudgery and labor and embrace me in the shadows of his teak pavilion. I am filled with these stories. My mother fed them to me as we worked side by side. From the time I was six until I turned twelve, banana leaves, raw sticky rice, overripe bananas that no one else would buy, and my mother's stories were the subjects of my everyday life. The leaves Má taught me to cut crosswise into three pieces. We would then soak them in water to keep them pliant. They had to drink in as much water as their veins could hold. They would need it later, when the heat would be merciless and full of rage. There was a steady rhythm to our movements that I still carry with me, a dream to lull me to sleep:
Her right hand dips into a basin of water, shaking from it a fragrant sheet of green. Her left hand skims a large bowl, where the raw rice has spent the night, cool underneath a blanket of water. She grabs a handful of grains, slowly spreading her fingers apart, letting the milky water drip and drain. She places what remains in her hand onto the middle of the leaf. I reach over and add thick slices of bananas, cut lengthwise in order to maximize the surface that is split and exposed from where their sweet juices will then flow. Each piece shows off two rows of black flecks, the distinctive markings of their tribe. "The darker the seeds," my mother says, "the riper the fruit." Her left hand returns to the bowl for a second handful of kernels, which then completely cover the bananas. Her hands join together for a brief moment and leave behind a packet of green. She slides it over to me, and I wrap it with a length of fibrous grass. The steamer will finish the task.
While my mother's hands followed a set routine, her stories never did. They were free to roam, to consider alternative routes, to invent their own ways home. Sometimes the "she" was a peasant girl bending over a bed of rice seedlings, which had yet to take root. "She" was occasionally a servant girl in the Imperial Palace, a noble face misplaced among the lowly rank and file. "She" was also a fishing village girl, who sat by the shore and darned the nets, who sang the same songs as her brothers but had never been allowed out to sea. "Home," though, was always the same, the teak pavilion and the scholar-prince, a man who was first and foremost wise and kind. His handsome looks, my mother always mentioned as something of an aside. As I got older, I thought her brief description was unsatisfactory, and I began pressing her for details about the scholar-prince. The first time I asked about him, I was eleven. My mother smiled in response and called me her "little scholar-prince." I stopped tying the packet in my hand.
"What? I am the scholar-prince?" I repeated, struggling to retain meaning in a fantasy turned upside down. As I sat wrapping and tying, I had never had a doubt. All this time, it was I who had the voice that would float over a misty lake, and it was always I who, in the end, got the scholar-prince, the teak pavilion, the shadow-graced embraces. I was, of course, the peasant, the servant, the fishing villager, except that in my version the "she" was undoubtedly a "he." The scholar-prince, I left as is, a man wise and kind. Though, in truth, in my version he was much more handsome than my mother could have ever imagined. My dear mother would have stopped the stories if she had