That's where the Love is

He's five years old and he’s looking at my hands while we’re waiting in line and he asks, “Why are your hands a different color than mine?” And I tell him that people come from many different places with all sorts of shades and colors and faces and mine come from islands where people are the color of chestnuts and sweet coffee, but I also come from people who are the color of ginger root and sand and from people who are the color of mushrooms and cream, and they’re all beautiful and together they made me.*

I come from a culture where food is celebrated, where celebrations are centered around food, and where we eat simply because it tastes good. Food is the first real connection I had with my Polynesian roots.

I am mostly white with a quarter cup mix of Polynesian ancestry; heavy on the Hawaiian and Filipino. Growing up as someone who is mixed I had a hard time feeling like I fit in anywhere. I felt too brown to be white and too white to be brown.

But food is a love language that brings people together, no matter the place, no matter the color. The magic is in the people who prepare it.

The main dish I remember eating growing up that connected me to my Polynesian roots was fried rice:

White rice with that brown soy sauce and brown, sizzling bacon. The bacon was always my favorite. I would volunteer to cook it because it beats chopping celery, and I’d pick it out secretly and eat it while I was cooking. I always burned my tongue.

We'd add green onions with white tips and celery, which I would scoop expertly around to avoid it. But now that I’m grown I realize it does add a nice flavor.

I still scoop expertly around to avoid it.

Then Uncle Norm moved to the neighborhood.

He wasn’t our blood uncle, but when you’re islander, every elder islander is your auntie or your uncle. He was a thick, short man with a balding shiny brown, beautifully round head and a salt and pepper beard. I don’t know how he ended up coming to Utah Valley from Hawaii, but he did, and he became our family.

And he brought love in the form of pani popo and teriyaki chicken.

He taught us how to make the pani popo; pale brown yeast with white flour to make dough to make golden rolls soaked and cooked in sweetened coconut milk.

But the real legacy of love was in his teriyaki chicken. He gave us his family’s secret recipe, told us it was ours to use, to make for our friends and family, and only after he died could we share the recipe with other people.

You need a big pot. No, the pot you use for the noodles will be too small--you need one taller, and bigger.

So in a tall silver pot we would add:

Ten pounds of beige and pink boneless chicken thighs.

That brown soy sauce. Enough to cover half the thighs. Water to cover the rest.

Green onions with white tips, two bunches, but no celery.

Ginger root the color of faded saffron sand and minced garlic. Four bulbs. Yes, the whole bulb.

White sugar. Lots of it.

The thing about love is that sometimes it takes time; and when it came to Uncle Norm’s teriyaki alchemy, that love took soaking in the fridge for two or three days. Stir occasionally.

Then after two or three days we’d pull that chicken out and grill it, serve it with fried rice, and pani popo.

You could taste the love it had been marinating in in every bite.

I remember finding my mother’s pa’u and pu’ili in her closet. I vaguely remember watching her hula.

But the thing I remember most growing up is the food.

After I moved away from home, I came back to visit and went straight to the fridge. You know, because that’s where the love is. And I saw a long, pink lei resting her head.

I called out, “Hey, what’s the lei for?”

“It was from Uncle Norm’s funeral.”

I stood there staring at that long, pink lei resting her head and yelled, “Nobody told me he was dead!”

“Oh. We thought we did.”

The thing about love is that sometimes it takes time, and when it comes to food--the love stays alive.

Food is a love language. You can’t change my mind.

*originally published in my first poetry book, Still Growing Wildflowers