Yours Truly 2016 / Cascadia College / Bothell, WA | Page 99

my fantasy and real life get smaller. Sure,
I’d imagined Norwegian giants to greet
me at the adoption-reunion gate. Instead, I
hugged the porcelain elf with curly, sweetpotato-colored hair. My biological sister,
Pickle.
***
“Let’s get pho for lunch,” Pickle
suggested. “There’s this place I go all the
time, and it’s not too far.” To which I replied,
“Awesome! Whatever you want,” which was
code for, I have no idea what pho is, and I’m
a really picky eater, so please don’t let this
be something weird. Pho didn’t exist in the
gourmet black hole I grew up in. The closest
thing we had to Asian food was General Tso
chicken from the Safeway deli counter.
Attempting a cool, long-lost-sister
swagger, I said to the waiter, “I’ll have what
she’s having,” to which she piped up, “I’ll
have my usual chicken pho,” and, gesturing
to me, “This is my sister.” Half-sister, I thought
to myself, feeling self-conscious tucked into
the booth she frequented on date nights with
her musician boyfriend. Did my appearance
in her life surprise the waiter? He didn’t let
it show if it did. Instead, he brought back
two bowls of steaming chicken soup.
Acting casual, I hesitated, watching her
pick up a giant stalk of basil and tear off the
leaves, dropping them one by one into the
steaming soup. She squirted in the sriracha
sauce, but that’s where I drew the line.
Strange sauces—condiments, really—are
not something I mess with. But I added the
bean sprouts. To be polite.

***
Bean sprout stir fry. Why couldn’t my
mom stir fry normal things, like chicken, red
peppers, and tiny ears of corn? She learned
to cook after marrying my dad, and as her
confidence grew, she began whipping up
a saucepan of soggy bean sprouts that
turned brown from the Yoshida’s sauce. The

“Acting casual, I hesitated”
slimy wigglers made me gag, and so I would
sit there, pushing them around my plate
until my mom was thoroughly exasperated.
“If you don’t eat it for dinner, you’ll eat it
for breakfast,” my mom reminded me of the
rule, as she trundled my siblings up to bed,
leaving me with a half-full plate. We laugh
now about the time my stubborn sister
held out for 24 hours before finally gagging
down my mother’s cooking.
Not normally prone to impulse or rule
breaking, but seeing this opportunity, I
dashed with a one-two clanging scrape of
my fork on the blue flowered plate into the
bathroom adjacent to the kitchen. With a
flush, my dinner swirled down the toilet.
Short-lived smugness, as I turned around
to see my dad standing in the lit doorway.
His look conveyed a thousand sympathies,
possibly envy, for he, too, had eaten from
the same dinner. “Put the dish in the sink,” he
said. I slinked off to bed with my conflicted
conscience stirring. He said nothing to my
mother of that incident.

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