Fork and Spoon

By Carrie Chang

In a glitterati of keen effects, Fork and Spoon presents the debacle of triumph over the dark side of humanity, where doubt and suspicion leave their precious mark of evil against the brighter side of the rainbow. In San Francisco Chinatown which describes a young Chinese American girls fascination with womanhood and romance, and the forays of her neighbors and her mother, Dora, who cant seem to make up her mind about what to do with the torrid affairs in the county. Richly embroidered with extended, juicy metaphor and episodic feats of muted joy, Fork and Spoon is a flying testament to Chinese feminism, to suburban poetry, and to the secrets of the sylvan heart.

In Carrie Changs second novel, Fork and Spoon, a family growing up in the suburbs of SF Chinatown is embroiled over sibling rivalry, hypocrisy, and ambition as they experience growing pains. Mona, a ten-year-old Chinese girl is independent, curious, and shy, an independent feminist at an early age searching for meaning in a wayward world of no regrets. Her brother, Ralph, chastises her for being such a loony, while he prays to saints, and their mother, Dora, brings them up in the thrill of the moment, while bemused Chinatown aunties look on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524504700

Carrie Chang

Carrie Chang was born in 1970, in Syracuse, New York. She attended Stanford University, UC-Berkeley and New York University, obtaining her B.A., and M.J. and M.F.A. in English and journalism and creative writing, respectively. She worked as an Asian American journalist in the arts/political field for almost a decade, creating her own magazine, “Monolid,” and lives as a writer/poet in the Bay Area. Her favorite pastimes include swimming and painting.

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Copyright © 2016 by Carrie Chang.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016908579

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-5245-0472-4

   Softcover   978-1-5245-0471-7

   eBook   978-1-5245-0470-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

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Rev. date: 05/24/2016

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To my father, I-Cheng, who taught me the meaning of life.

It was deep in one of those secundo bakeries in Chinatown superior where you’ll find the simple truth, that the tricky menometer of the old sylvan heart dies hard. Whereas sugar, glazed red beets, and chandelier coffee cause the finical dark eyes to wander from the fattish teapot to the tray of cold, blum tarts, it’s one of those new-fangled, dandified haircuts of the fobbie Asian men that make you leap out of your seat, and dream oft of faraway tropical islands like Taipei and Singapore, those islets of wavy bailiwicks where one’s deluge of consciousness is like the music of a love supreme.

Such modest invitations to the rosy-eyed monks and left-handed compliments to the tall lady with the griffin smile, these too are forgotten with passing inveterate time, and one is left to ponder passing history over the course of a romantic life in the cool shade. As lost soul passengers to another world of reincarnation, we click our strapless gilt shoes and guess the meaning of Tang Ren Tang or Chinatown’s crystal ball of apple-colored fantasies, its whistling demagogues and its most appealing mistresses of the forbidden stitch.

Yut, Ye, Sam, and some cruel moments without the watery Oolong tea might bring you to your very brown-beige knees in your best dandelion-print dress, as you bow like Kora in hell, a spring Buddha dwelling in your most secretive thoughts, per se. Could it be time to drink the cold jujube tea again, and sift through the sacred photos of the second sort? Lord knows that this could be the intuit to your finer, thought-out destiny.

At Ha Sing bakery, the little retro egg tarts glitter jello cold and damp custard yellow with an obnoxious giggle from the tiny Canto women who eat them spare, and the shag carpet gives off an insolent air of voluptuous gypsy love, scoured by potions and lotions which leave an odd twinkle in the disdainful, open eye. Red, natty carpet which rolls out, resembling the onion cakes in the tarmac street, selling here so well in the glass cabinets at high noon, as so many of the nattiest bohemians walk in and plunk down their starry green coinage on the counter-top with a useless, intemperate sigh.

Not that it matters how bad their Cantonese is, or how the sulky cashier witch praises them for their most outrageous tongue and looks for the hollow man inside; he totals up the nasty, perfumed bills, and makes a Felix-the-cat face, demanding to know just who really thinks the best barbecued pork is really decent fare. Bright neon pink effluvium for the taking, or popular bubble-gum meat for the neo-choppy barbarian in the passing inveterate shadows. The ambrosial goop of the carmine stripe, just waiting to be devoured with no big regrets and some floppy pig ears at that.

Those swirling coffee-colored molasses ears with smoky numbers in a puffed-up brown bag, flowing into the deprived hands of children who are farting every hour. Now that’s ex-libris, thought the old mandarin grandma with one crooked nostril passing by, gorgeous in her leather blue octopus eye shining with such glowing, naked opulence. Who could blame them for noshing so illiberally in such a spoiled way with white zig teeth hanging out, when the food was so mumsy-mum? To serenade one of them, Ralph, with a shrieking, high-pitched falsetto, was her desire, but she couldn’t bear to say more than a few culpable words.

Taro root smiles kept her pitching wildly. For a stranger comfort, some vicarious struggle with folded cloth napkins and blunt ivory chopsticks, clicking with a quiet unchained melody in the background, gathering energy en masse. Mona resembled a quiet comma of happiness, tucked under her mother’s arm with a keen despair, her short-cropped bangs whimsical as bristly, beastly numbers. Some bright pharaoh in her eyes kept good old Mrs. Yam on her guard, full of witness and utter, diehard curiosity. Something less than equal in her gaze caused a sudden rupture in her lonely heart, and Mrs. Yam could feel the azure jade around her neck shatter with inopportune light, quizzical as ever in this make-believe ghetto of endless hours.

It didn’t matter if Mona and Ralph were perfect siblings like a fork and spoon, clanging together on a perfect plate of surreal childhood fantasy; there was something enviable about the way Mona was decorated so sportively for such a young age, and with such prettified airs at that, which would scare a duchess. With painted red henna hands, and coiffed, perfect spirals at age ten, she resembled that ideal demimonde, and was squawking nonsensicalities in a high falsetto that made all the fat merchants sigh in the afternoon as they traipsed about looking for clues to the century’s enigmatic close. As they put their shellacked wares in their ecru windows, grimacing at the touristy victims of their genius, they glared at Mona, in her rosy lenses, some petite curiosity of a girl who had shed many tears in front of the bakery, and who alluded to C-town as crap-town.

There was a kung-pao happiness about her, and a firecracker sparkle around the ruby stitches of her dress, that the pedestrians saluted her, and called her their little queen.

And made Ralph cry. Poor, cynical Ralph who at that early age of twelve had already begun to resent the fringes on Mona’s Friday coat, and to mope behind a comic book that had no sting. It was the mental a priori of the crowd who knew that Ralph would grow up to be priest, and his sister a thief of time.

I don’t know if you believe in ghosts on the tap, or have seen the end of the world in 9 mm footage, but I do think your children will be saved from hypocrisy of the age by the very looks of their beautiful eyes, said Mrs. Yam, to the mother, Dora, who bowed curiously, and resembled the very picture of a weathered Mona Lisa with oh-so-brilliant skin, laughing in the costume with a perfect hairnet. She was a mite young to be a mother, jaded as it were, decked out in hippie, Krishna-colored jeans, and struck the old lady Yam as a modernist of the young rebellious stripe, buying candy-flavored cigarettes and smoking them for effect, avoiding bourgeois values even when they were sub-cum "wonderful."

Hateful, that’s what you are, joked Mrs. Yam, doubting the pretty woman’s intellect and praising her for her effete youthfulness, and her vivacious, lemon-scented children, scrubbed to utter perfection. There was a certain twang in Dora’s Cantonese, which had been passed down to her in a tiny soap-dish as a token of posterity. She wore many golden rings that did not match or even fit, and was clumsy, in an elfin way; she had grown up eating so much thrifty A-vegetables that her shiny skin was a tad Cherokee blue, just ripe for the California sunlight in the balmy afternoons, when the gods would unmask her as a cynical yuppie-in-the-making. Wicked high heel shoes with a cerebral twist in them spelled-out gaudy in an oriental corkscrew fashion, and there were beige cobblestones that had her proper middle name carved all over them.

At that very moment as they stood chatting on Mercy St. Dora Yee blushed, and let out a truly exasperated sigh, for Mona was always skirting about on bended heels, and trying to prove some law of gravity, looking sweet with slanted eyes which spooked you indelibly in your someday surfer dreams. Mona looked half-Dutch in fact, despite her Chinese blood, and took after her deceased father, who had given her an inherited home-grown wisdom in the hetch. Like an adorable, cut-up houseplant, she would grow up wilted, with slim sides, and blemmy cheeks, with deadly romantic jargon that was reminiscent of the great poets of old age antiquity. There was nothing half-way, or cum-de-cum about her.

For a child so young, she could peer sideways through the thick of it, into the trouble-zones of a convo breeder and diagnose heartbreak in her dear, dear mother, who would never guess that she was already a guppy shadow seeping in the corner of the huge, dusty house. With her tattered shoe-laces, and her miniature bi-focals–for she was cursed with a bout of bad eyes–- that fit snugly around her ears, Mona, remained firm in her fairytale vision, a spidery slip of a Chinese girl–-someone who was cursed with the gift of being the devilish unicorn, a female in a staid black cosmos of apocalyptic disorder. She would always be fetching charisma for Ralph, a feeling that was underworked, wracked emotional girls feel upon wrestling with outstanding karma, and always beating about the bush.

I’ve never known a girl to eat fortune cookies and have snake lips and fake blue skin like that, confessed Mrs. Yam, as she admired Mona from head to toe, and believed she played the part of a spoiled charmer or a movie star. She hadn’t the faintest idea of what else to say, being diffident, and stood up against the pan of traffic like a scarecrow, waving her arms, as if to ward off blissful evil.

Evil, indeed! There was a blustery effect about the wind’s turnabout quality, blowing primrose-scented golf hats off the populace of C-town, of whose people felt