Archive of Our Own

When you pull up to your friend Bruce’s house for Thanksgiving, you don’t expect the first person you see to be a tattooed woman.

You also don’t expect her to wrap her arm around your throat, yank you just inside the doorway, and point a knife at your throat.

“Why are you here?” the woman asks.

“Bruce!” you yell, though the tail end of your statement is quickly cut off when the blade gets closer. You can’t really fight back unless a paper grocery bag of chocolate chips and other holiday ingredients counts as a weapon. Actually, you’re not much of a fighter at all. “Help?” you call out.

There’s the sound of frantic footsteps against the wood floor and something angry being exchanged in Mandarin. You barely get the tail end of it, because it’s hard to put your Mandarin lessons to work when there’s a knife held right in front of you.

“Wait wait waitwaitwait,” Bruce sprints down the hallway in mismatched slippers. You’re pretty sure one of them belongs to TK. “June, this is my friend from medical school. Parents are out of town, cooks really good food? I thought I told you already.”

The woman, presumably June, folds the knife back into her belt. “Don’t try us,” she growls before stepping back inside.

“Is this an improv thing?” you ask Bruce.

“Eh…” he replies.

After taking off your shoes and storing them on the rack by the door, you deposit your backpack in Bruce’s room and take the ingredients to the kitchen.

“My mom’s super good at cooking. Expect the full spread today. Spareribs, dumplings, green beans, whatever else we manage to fit in. TK’s getting a roast duck in a bit. We’re having the thin pancakes with it, if you haven’t tried it yet.”

You’re familiar with all of those dishes, but you don’t want to ruin it for him. You let him keep going on about the Asian-Americanness of the food and whatnot while he leads you to the kitchen, which is smelling less like the salty fat and oil of hearty food and more like ash.

“Crap, I’m sorry. Hold on a second,” Bruce tells you before he leaps into the fray. The same woman from earlier, June, frantically pours a glass of water onto a pan fire, which predictably fans the flames into a temporary inferno. While the flames are roaring, the Mandarin curses are flying.

“You idiot!”

“What did I tell you? I teach you, and you still don’t listen!”

“Stick with the-” the line is cut off with some words you can’t understand.

A bearded man deftly throws a damp dish towel over the pan after turning off the heat, Bruce opens the window, and TK just stands there laughing while everyone else weaves around him.

“Sorry,” Bruce says after dashing out of the kitchen, donning a sheepish grin. “Families, am I right?”

You suddenly understand how much of his family’s problems with improv are pure projection. The entire kitchen looks like a skit gone wrong. “No one’s hurt, right?”

“Yeah, don’t worry. Oh! I forgot to introduce you to everyone.” Before you can object, Bruce grabs you by the shoulder and shoves you ahead of him straight into-

The bearded man blocking the kitchen entryway stares down at you. He’s wearing a dark red polo shirt and a pink apron with cats on it. “Bruce, who the fuck is this?”

And once he says that, the older woman you assume is Bruce’s mom also stares at you. TK, wearing sunglasses indoors, glances over and grins. You wave back at him. He sometimes gets you a discount on drinks for the handful of times you’ve gone clubbing.

Bruce sighs and tells them your name. “You know, my med school classmate. Taught me how to cook a few recipes for myself so I don’t die while you’re in Taiwan? I swear I told you all a week ago.”

No answer. You feel yourself shrinking under their empty stares spare for Bruce’s mother, Eileen, who seems to know all of this and is simply staying quiet to watch you squirm. It’s weird to connect an actual person to the woman you’ve heard so many stories about during late-night study sessions and glanced at during said late-night study sessions through Bruce’s Facetime calls before he bolted out of the room.

Finally, she nods and smiles. “Have none of you paid attention?” she asks the others. “Of course I approve of Bruce’s friends. Shape up. Your minds are getting so dull you almost set the house on fire cooking leeks.”

Bruce introduces everyone to you, gesturing at them with each name. “This is Eileen, my mother. But you know her name already. This is Charles, my brother. June’s, a, uh, family friend. And TK, but you also know him already.”

“It’s nice to meet you in person, Auntie Eileen,” you say, pulling out a box of not-cheap oranges and bowing your head slightly. “Thank you for inviting me to your home.”

She moves forward, Charles stepping aside, and takes the oranges, placing them in the fridge. “It is my pleasure. Now, I think it is time I get back to cooking with Charles.” She shoots a pointed look at TK and June. “The leeks will not cook themselves.”

“Is it all right if I also cook?” you ask. “I know it’s not ideal, but I, uh, didn’t have time to bake the pecan pie before I got here. But it’s quite easy to make, and I can help clean.”

You know you’re overstepping your bounds, because guests normally aren’t supposed to help with food. They’re called guests for a reason. But this is America, and given that two of the people in the kitchen almost burned the house down, you figure that Eileen and the brother, Charles, might appreciate the extra dish.

“I couldn’t possibly let you,” says Eileen.

TK drops the pan full of charred leeks with a huge crash. You don’t even know how he got it.

Eileen holds back a sigh. One of her eyes twitches, though you barely notice. “June, go get the roast duck with TK. Bruce, clean up the pan. You, just do what Charles tells you to.”

An afternoon and evening with the man who seems to only be capable of scowling in a polo shirt. Or scowling in a pink cat apron. Awesome.

With only two people in the kitchen (three, including you), everything is a lot less chaotic. You’d already placed your ingredients in the fridge, and now:

“What do you need help with?” you ask Charles, who’s chopping a rack of spareribs into precise two-inch segments with a heavy cleaver.

“The leeks,” he says, pointing his chin at the fridge. “They’re smaller. Cut them for the dumplings.”

You open the fridge, take out the leeks after avoiding a game of Jenga with stacked jars of condiments, and start chopping.

“It needs to be finer.”

You run the knife over the leeks again, chopping the coin-like leaves crossways.

“It needs to be finer,” Charles says again after you silently show him your handiwork.

You chop it crossways again.

“Finer. I already told you.”

You keep chopping it. It’s not getting any finer unless Charles wants mush.

“How?” you ask, suddenly.

He motions for you to move, and you do. While you stand in front of the bowl of cut spareribs, cold water soaking out the blood, you watch his hands. One hand on the end of the knife, while the other rocks the handle up and down. A corner of the leeks is pulverized into bits.

He wordlessly trades places with you. You do as he shows, one hand on the end of the knife while the other rocked the handle up and down. You rendered the leeks into finer bits.

“Not bad,” Charles admits.

After stirring together the filling for the dumplings and (properly) stir-frying half of the leeks for later, Eileen leaves. She says she has to use the bathroom, but part of you thinks her break has something to do with the fact that it’s been half an hour and neither Bruce, TK, June, or the roast duck are in the house.

Which leaves just you and Charles in the kitchen as you faintly overhear stern Mandarin from around the corner.

“Time for the ribs,” Charles tells you. He doesn’t have to for you to know; something about the body language of this place isn’t so different from home. As he places the ribs into the pan for sauteing, he calls for ingredients.

Dark soy sauce. Honey. Oyster sauce. Five-spice. Garlic. Scallions. You don’t even realize he’s switched to Mandarin because all of the words ring so familiarly in your heart.

“Scallions, too?” you ask in Mandarin.

“No,” Charles replies, and then, in English, deep voice quiet over the sizzling of meat, “You can understand me?”

“Yeah?” Why wouldn’t you?

“You knew about the oranges, the bow. Did you ever live in China?” It makes sense he would ask that. Your accent isn’t American, but it isn’t Taiwanese either. You know where your ancestry lies, but you’ve long since decided that not everybody gets to hear it.

“I’m half,” you admit to him, collecting the condiments and placing them back in the fridge the exact way they came.

He does a double take at that, craning his head around to look at your features. “It explains the hair. Which half?”

“The one you can’t see,” you answer, setting the oven to the temperature needed for your pie.

Sometimes your upbringing felt like a secret power. Other times, it reminded you of a threshold you couldn’t step across no matter how hard you tried.

“Huh,” is all he says for a while, ducking away. “How did you know my Ma liked that type of orange?”

You smile, making an effort to meet his eyes as you open the fridge. “Bruce told me.”

“What is it?” he asks. You’d had the foresight to make the dough in advance, and Charles was kind enough to set the flour and a rolling pin on a clean part of the counter.

“Huh?”

“The dessert.”

“Oh. This is going to be a pecan pie.”

“Pecan?”

“Hold on.” You take out your phone and scroll to the dictionary app. “It’s…hútáo?”

“I’ve never heard of it before.”

You arrange the necessary ingredients: maple syrup, brown sugar, eggs, butter, vanilla extract, chocolate, bourbon, and, of course, pecans. “I don’t think they grow in Taiwan.” That was part of why you wanted to make it for Bruce’s family. The main ingredient was a fun novelty.

“How large should the crust be?” Charles asks.

You shrug and continue attacking the crust with a rolling pin. “About yay big? Hey, do you know where I can find a pie plate?”

Charles is no longer by your side, but the hollow sound of a cupboard door opening and the following rummaging process means he’s somewhere near the corner. “Here.” He passes the plate to you. You realize he’s not actually scowling, but simply has a bad case of RBF.

Also, it’s hard to be intimidated by the smiling cats on his pink apron.

“Thanks. Could you toast half the package of pecans? The temperature’s already set, you just leave them on a baking tray.”

A hand reaches around you to grab the package. There’s the noise of a plastic bag opening, the bang of a baking tray being taken out, tin foil being unwrapped and torn. Scattered falling pecans. “Is this good?”

The distribution of pecans is roughly approaching thermodynamic equilibrium. “Yeah. Just pop them in for eight minutes.”

Hot air rushing out of the oven. Door closing. Beeping oven timer. Charles crossing his arms and leaning back against the counter to watch you work.

The crust comes together well. You trim off the excess to a uniform length and fold the edge under itself. You look left to check on the oven and make direct eye contact with Charles. You smile, because why not, and the corner of his mouth twitches before he looks away. The kitchen is quiet, spare for the slow simmering of spareribs.

“Do all pies in America have the crusts folded?” he asks when you’re crimping the edges into gentle waves with a chopstick.

“Most of them, yeah. It gets pretty elaborate if you’re doing a top crust. One of my friends from undergrad used to cut out all of these flowers and leaves so the pie looked like a garden. I think she just used a razor blade for all of it. Even knew how to place the leaves in layers so every piece got cooked evenly.”

You miss her terribly and bringing her up used to cause tears, but you keep talking about how she turned all of her pies and bread into works of art, from schools of fish to jungle animals and swirling abstract designs. She even won a few contests for it. And compared to the other people in your life (sorry, Bruce and TK), who aren’t so much into baking, Charles doesn’t space out or change the topic. He just listens, asking questions occasionally about the type of dough or filling used. The two of you jump when the oven timer goes off and he extricates the pecans from the oven.

“Will yours have one, too?” he asks after you put the crust back into the fridge.

“Nah, I was never too good at that kind of stuff. You can arrange the pecans on top if you want, though.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. You’re super good at baking, and you helped me already. Just make it look good.”

He nods in confirmation, and you think his brow unfurrows. “Sure.” Then his brow furrows again. “Is that alcohol?”

You hold up the tiny bottle of bourbon before pouring its contents into the mixing bowl. “Can’t have a southern pecan pie without the bourbon. Kind of like the rice wine soup for tangyuan, I guess.”

“I guess so.”

“The alcohol cooks off, I promise!”

He exhales at that, and you’re aware your heart could be in a state of tachycardia from how quickly it beats.

Quick, say something!

“Can you chop up two-thirds of the pecans? I think fourths or fifths should be good. But leave the rest, please, ‘cause you’ll need them for the top.”

Charles nods and gets to work.

The door slams open, Charles almost dropping a pecan onto the floor, and you hear Eileen fussing over Bruce in Mandarin all the way from the kitchen and telling TK not to slam the door. By now, you’re busy pouring the filling into the crust and smoothing it over with a spatula.

“We went shopping,” Bruce says, voice becoming louder the closer he gets, “to try and earn our keep while waiting for the duck to be ready.”

You turn around and look.

You glance at the packet of instant potatoes Bruce proudly presents to you in the midst of a home-cooked feast-in-progress.

Oh, no.

You know you should maintain decorum if Eileen and Charles and June are here, but c’mon, he’s Bruce. You’ve been over at his house longer than they know.

“Instant potatoes? Get outta here!” you joke, swatting at him with your spatula.

“I know it looks bad, but hear me out. It’s American carbs on an American holiday! And the chives are already included!” He glances nervously at your batter-covered spatula.

“You know what this means, Bruce,” you say completely seriously. “This calls for the paste punishment.”

“I am completely undeserving of the paste punishment, I’ll have you know,” he retorts. TK just laughs.

You flick the spatula towards him. “Please, I am but a humble servant,” he backs up with every step you take forward, “Please. I beg you. No more paste punishment!”

You give the spatula a good hard flick. “You brought instant potatoes to a holiday meal.” Eileen gives you a pointed look, so you don’t finish the rest of that original thought. “Your punishment is clean-up duty. Or else I’m shoving this up your nose,” you whisper-yell, still watchful of Eileen’s skeptical eye.

Charles snorts and starts coughing.

“You okay?” Bruce asks.

“I think he’s fine,” June says from where she’s watching procedural reruns on the couch, Charles still loudly coughing.

“This is your fault, Bruce,” you say. “Your brother’s choking because of your instant potatoes.”

“Okay, okay! I promise to serve no more instant food to you, my liege,” Bruce says with an awful English accent. He tries to bow like he did when he played Proteus in the most recent improv reenactment of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and ends up slamming his forehead directly into your pecan pie-covered spatula.

“Bruce!”

“That was your fault for getting in the way, my liege,” he says, swiping the filling off his forehead. “Do you think I can eat this, by the way?”

“I don’t think Proteus said ‘my liege’ in the play. And no, it has raw egg.”

“Improv is a niche art, okay? It has a little something called ‘creative license,’ which I don’t think you’d understand.”

“Enough,” Eileen says. “If you cannot appreciate Bruce’s offer, I’m sure you and Charles,” she glances at both you and him, “can finish cooking dinner by yourselves. I have some family business to attend to.”

Charles and you look at each other. The panic in your eyes is mutual.

Fuck.

The stir-fried green beans and fried rice can wait until later, the duck is taken care of, and the spareribs only need to be kept simmering, which means you have to fold the dumplings next.

First, though.

“It’s not my best work,” Charles says after stepping back. The pecans are so neatly arranged on top of the filling that it looks like a bunch of flowers or fireworks taking up the space.

“What do you mean? This looks really good.” You look up at him and smile again, because again, why not. It always cheers Bruce up.

“I…,” he holds your gaze and exhales. “Sure.”

“C’mon, let’s bake it. Fifty-five minutes, that’s enough time for us to fold the dumplings.”

It turns out that by letting you and Charles take over, Eileen never mentioned she wouldn’t pass through the kitchen like an eagle, spotting every flaw.

“What are you doing?” she asks you when you fumble your way through your second dumpling. You look to Charles for support, but he just nods along with her.

Oh, boy. You have a pretty good idea of why Bruce gave up on cooking with his family.

But they’re not your family, and so it means their comments won’t be deeply personal.

“Are you sure you’re half Chinese?” asks Charles. Eileen looks at you, eyes scanning your features again, and, well.

Okay, ouch.

You feel tears springing in your eyes, and you don’t want to act like a child in someone else’s home during the holidays. You’ve encountered this enough to know you shouldn’t let it get to you. People usually don’t say it to be mean. But things were going so well with Charles, and you thought maybe Bruce’s family could accept you for the day.

You excuse yourself to use the restroom.

“What’s wrong?” Bruce asks when he sees you stalk past the living room. He and TK are playing a racing game on the console TK brought, and June’s hanging over them like an ominous emo babysitter.

“Nothing,” you say. “Just gotta take a break.”

“You can always join us, y’know. Aunt Eileen and Charles have had the past week handled,” says TK. “You’ll have to wait until June’s turn with the Xbox is done, though.”

“Was it something my brother said?”

You stop walking for half a second.

“Was it about you being half?” TK asks.

“Yeah,” you finally admit.

“Dude, don’t worry about it. I’m full Korean and half the Koreans on your campus don’t count me as Asian.”

“Who?” you demand, because that’s a load of shit and you want to know.

“Does it matter? My thumbs are back to normal and I’m beating the fuck out of Bruce on Burnout Revenge. Those nerds have nothing on me. Now, c’mon. Get back in there. Fold us some dumplings.”

So you plan on it. But before you do, you turn to June, who looks bored out of her mind. “...Hey.”

“Hi.”

You’re pretty sure she’s like Charles in that she has a bad case of RBF and isn’t actually glaring at you. You hope. Who knows.

“The, uh, knife from today. That was an improv bit, right? Right?”

“No. I thought you were an intruder.” She toys with her phone, which has a wallpaper of her smiling next to another woman in pink clothing on it.

“Oh. Sorry about that.”

“Whatever.” She shoos you away, probably so she doesn’t have to answer for whatever happened earlier with the leeks.

Maybe she’s a military veteran, you think to yourself. Except the war in Afghanistan ended a few years ago.

Charles and Eileen seem a bit surprised when you come back, but they stand aside to give you a place at the counter, as much as they grumble about it.

You take a deep breath. You can do it. It’s just like school, where incorporating criticism upon criticism meant your lab writeups didn’t turn out half bad.

“Sorry, how do you get one side smooth like that?” you ask Eileen.

“You only pleat the outer side,” she explains, shoving the bowl of filling at you.

Right when you finish wetting the edge of the wrapper with water and begin folding it on the left side, she tsks again. “What did I tell you? Start in the center!”

So you do. Filling first, wet the edge, fold in the center. Pleat two times-

“Just once,” Charles murmurs next to you. “Don’t fold both edges.”

Five dumplings later, you show your latest work to Eileen.

“You are not completely terrible,” she finally admits, and the shame from earlier flies away like a white crane.

“You want to do the honors, Charles?” You hand him the oven mitts, which are also pink. Maybe Eileen shopped at the same clearance sales as your parents, because you’re pretty sure you have this exact pair at home.

“Stop making a big deal of things,” he says, but he still puts on the mitts and takes the pie out with utmost care.

The pie, resting on a set of quilted trivets, is a rich brown with a golden crust. Three arrays of pecans radiate out of center points like flowers in a garden. It looks far better than anything you’ve baked in your life. You’re good at the core of things, the flavors and textures. Not so much the cosmetic details.

“We did good,” you say more to yourself than to him as the two of you admire the pie.

Potstickers done, green beans prepared and ready for stir frying, leftover rice and fixings fluffed up and also ready for stir frying.

“Was there anything you wanted to bake?” you ask Charles. The two of you are leaning on the counter, you with your arms crossed like him. “I kind of took all your time with the pie.”

He frowns, considering, until he finds a can of pureed pumpkin, left over from your last-minute shopping trip, on the counter. “How do you feel about nanguabing?”

There’s enough time, even if it’s getting dark outside. You look up at him and smile, because you came back and helped him and Eileen, and you’re still eager to prove yourself.

“Please teach me.”

He does the same thing he did earlier, bites the inner side of his bottom lip and briefly turns away.

“It’s fine if not,” you finally say. Maybe you’re overstepping.

“No. Let’s do it.”

He calls out the ingredients in a mix of Mandarin and English, and you sort through the cupboards and bring them to him.

“How many times has Bruce invited you over?” he asks, noting how familiar you are with the layout.

“Just enough to teach him how to cook a few dishes,” you answer as truthfully as possible. “Sometimes I come over to game with him and TK. The location rotates.” You were more into co-op puzzle games, and more often than not you ended up rage-quitting when TK did a completely boneheaded move unintentionally or Bruce did a completely boneheaded move intentionally.

Charles opens the can of pumpkin puree and dumps the contents into a bowl along with two types of rice flour, salt, sugar, and some milk powder. You watch him mash the contents together.

“You seem to be good friends.”

“I hope you,” you answer, “since our study group is the only reason we make it to labs on time. I dunno what I’d do without him.” A bit of an exaggeration; Bruce was able to bullshit his results without doing any actual work, and you were keeping a steady 3.80, unweighted, despite your innate urge to procrastinate on assignments by formulating progressively weirder combinations of cookie flavors.

He slices open the bag of red bean paste and squeezes the insides into another bowl. Without a word, he divides the dough into twelve parts entirely through eyeballing, a skill you wish you had. He starts rolling the pieces into little balls, and you copy him. It’s a companionable silence, or at least you believe it is. The two of you working side by side, you doing your best to emulate.

“What are your intentions with my brother?”

Holy left field.

You start cackling. The ball of pumpkin dough in your hand gets extruded between your fingers into a million pieces. You double over. You would have smacked your forehead on the counter if Charles didn’t put his hand out at the last minute.

He just stares at you with confusion, the poor guy.

“Everything okay?” Bruce calls out from the couch.

“None of your business,” says Charles.

Bruce presumably gives him a thumbs-up because that’s what he always does.

Finally, you stop laughing and reform the squished dough back into a ball, bumping into Charles in the process. “We’re just friends! He’s seeing someone else, and believe me, we are not interested in each other like that. Never will be. I just want to make that clear.”

You two were as thick as thieves, but he never told you who he was seeing. Even so, you had a pretty good guess at who it was.

“You don’t need to keep laughing,” Charles says, and his tone makes up for the half-and-half comment from earlier. God, this is awkward.

“I’m sorry, it’s just funny the way you said it.” You pause. “Seriously, it’s nice of you to be concerned about him. Makes me wish I had a sibling.” You know it’s more complicated than that, but it would have been nice to have someone who looked up to you.

“Your dough is too thin in the center,” Charles points out, effectively shutting down that particular train of thought. “You need to re-roll it before we can get to the filling.”

“Like this?” you ask him again and again after each successive pass, the dough thinner and thinner in tiny increments. He sighs and fixes you with that furrowed glare of his, but eventually he acquiesces and says yes. You flatten out three more balls of dough, taking care to ensure they are all exactly the same thickness as the one he approved of.

In that time, he’s completed the rest and already begun to fill them.

You’re not good at these things, but you’ll learn, and you’re willing to learn.

After a ton of stir frying and frantically transferring things into bowls, you rest for a few minutes while June is busy scaring Bruce and TK into setting the table without fucking anything up.

She’s not so bad, you decide, even if she did hold a knife to your throat. Getting TK and Bruce to do anything outside of their respective interests was a pain, but she wrangles them far more effectively than you ever could.

Maybe the bit about holding knives to people was what got them to listen.

Soon, all six of you are seated at the round table, Eileen at the head seat right across from the entryway. Charles is on her left, Bruce on her right, June on Charles’s left, TK on Bruce’s right, and finally you in the seat of lowest importance, your back facing the entryway. June briefly scrambles for Bruce’s seat until Eileen shakes her head, and you wonder what on earth the family business Bruce talks about could possibly entail.

Roast duck, warmed from the oven and accompanied by pancakes, plum sauce, and chopped scallions and cucumbers. Spareribs, simmered in rich sauce. Fried rice with trimmings emanating welcoming steam. Crisp stir-fried green beans, steps above the soggy casserole you used to avoid at family gatherings. Pork and leek dumplings, your own atrocious dumplings hidden somewhere in the fray.

“Let’s eat,” Eileen says.

“You are good at using chopsticks,” Eileen observes.

“Thank you.” You don’t tell her you’ve been using them since you were six.

“How did you and Bruce meet?” June asks after a few chopstick-fuls of duck.

“It’s-”

“It’s-”

Both you and Bruce look at each other. “No, you go ahead,” you tell him.

“No, you,” he says.

“Get on with it,” June grouses.

You put your chopsticks down. Bruce nods at you. “It’s kind of a funny story. I was trying to get into anatomy lab, except the middle of the building is divided by this giant wall and I was on the wrong side.” You blink at Bruce, who picks up the story.

“I’m trying to review my notes and hype myself up before we start dissecting the corpse, and there’s this banging on the wall. I thought one of the bodies had come alive or something, so I threw my notebook at the noise and yelled, ‘What do you want?’”

“Seriously? That was why?”

“You haven’t watched enough zombie movies, my liege,” he says again with that stupid fake accent.

You grin. “Dude, you couldn’t sleep for weeks the last time we watched The Shini-”

“Anyway! I hear words through the wall. Human words. I tell the person making these words to exit, walk around to the right, and enter the room from there. And who shows up right before the doors close and takes the seat right next to me?”

“All the others were taken!”

“I told you sitting next to the life-sized nervous system model had its charm.”

“That’s the story of our friendship,” you say after swallowing your mouthful of sparerib. The meat falls right off the bone. “Nobody else wanted to sit by the creepy model, so I kept coming back.”

“Bruce couldn’t sleep for weeks after watching a horror movie?” June asks. “I should play them more often.”

“That’s not the lesson you should be taking away from this story!” Bruce exclaims. TK laughs and almost knocks his glass of water onto your plate.

Everyone breaks up into their own blocks of conversation. Bruce and TK talk about the medically accurate health meter they’re getting people to make a mod for on Dead Space (with an occasional admonishment from Eileen about focusing on studies), Eileen speaks quietly with Charles, and it’s just you and June eating next to each other.

You notice she likes the spareribs from how many more bones are left on her plate compared to everyone else’s.

“Hey, Bruce, could you pass the spareribs?” you ask after catching his eye. He nods and lifts it over, and you take it with thanks.

You take a piece, and you don’t move the dish back. June takes a few more pieces and makes eye contact with you. You lift one arm in an approximation of a shrug, and the two of you leave the bowl where it is, quietly listening to everyone else while finishing your food.

“Those are nice tattoos,” you say to her after some time. “They all healed really well.”

She raises an eyebrow. “I did them all myself.”

“Even the ones on your neck?”

She nods. “Yep.”

“How?” You’re picturing her undergoing Cirque du Soleil-esque contortionist poses to hit the spot right on the back of her neck under her hairline.

“Mirror,” she remarks, taking the second to last piece of spareribs.

“Just take the last piece,” you murmur. “Nobody else is eating it.”

She frowns, chopsticks still hovering above the bowl.

“If anyone asks, it was me,” you say.

She nods, emptying the bowl, and you get the sense that she dislikes you a little less than before.

You’re ready to pass out from the sheer quantity of food when Charles calls your name.

“It’s time to fry the pumpkin cakes,” he says. “If you want to see.”

You look at Bruce and June for approval. They both shrug. You look at Eileen, and she gives the tiniest nod imaginable.

It feels like home in a way, this shared body language.

You get up from your chair and follow Charles into the kitchen, almost bumping into him when he opens the fridge door to take out the cakes. “Sorry.”

He waves it off. “The pan has to be at medium-high heat.” He takes out a cast-iron pan, pours in some oil, and turns on the burner.

While he waits for the oil to heat up, the two of you resume your previous positions: leaning back against the counter, arms crossed.

“You’re an only child,” he says, staring ahead at the pan. “But your parents aren’t here.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

It takes you a while to answer. You’ve heard lots of nightmare stories about siblings who hated each other, but you’ve also heard plenty of anecdotes about siblings who loved each other, stuck by each other no matter what. It’s a level of sacrifice you only started understanding and developing in high school, when your parents grew impatient with you.

Being an only child wasn’t bad, even if you were an accident. Your parents loved, still love to travel. As a result, they were some of the only ones in their generation who never intended to have kids. After a rocky start, they did their best to take care of you, even stayed put in the Valley so you wouldn’t have to change schools often and didn’t have to leave behind your friends.

They set aside as much money as they could to pay for your education, made you responsible for your own dreams and life. When you turned eighteen, you realized how much you loved them, that you wanted them to be free.

So when you started college with a major in chemistry and the intent to become a doctor, you told them to take their dream jobs, that you could hold down the fort in America.

You’re still not sure what they do, but medical school went from a dream to an easily achievable reality. You have free rein of the house provided you not disturb their room. It’s the ideal plan anyone you age would kill to have. You’re deeply grateful for it.

Your parents are more like polite housemates than parents, and if they’re happy, so are you in that empty house.

“What’s it like?” he repeats.

“Lonely,” you say at last.

You hear the oil sizzling. Charles gets there before you do.

“Arrange them like this,” he says, placing the cakes into the pan with some space in between. “We’ll flip them when the middle puffs up.”

“It’s on you,” he says after patting off the first batch with a wad of paper towels. “Flip them when they puff up.”

“Are you sure?”

“Why else would I call you back here?”

Fair. You study the cakes. They’re more like thick pancakes than actual cakes, but you think it might just be a translation error. The word for cake in Mandarin is also used for pancakes and any sort of round cooked pastry, while the word for a Western-style cake is different.

You experimentally feel the top of one cake with the chopstick. Charles gives a slight nod, and you flip it over, then the next and the next and the next.

“You flipped the last one too early,” he says. “But not bad.”

“I was scared of burning the sugar in the dough,” you admit.

“Ah, you realize it too.” There’s a glint of light in his eyes from the kitchen lights.

“I learned it today, from the best,” you joke, and he briefly turns away. But you see, before he can hide it, a small yet genuine smile.

Is that what he was doing this whole time?

The pumpkin cakes are well-received (who doesn’t like mildly sweet dough with sesame seeds and piping hot red bean filling?), the pecan pie less so. Eileen takes a small bite of her slice to be polite, but her face wrinkles in the same way your grandmother’s did when she ate something she didn’t like. Not too sweet, she always reminded you.

What is it with Asian moms and not liking sweet things?

Either way, you don’t take it personally. You probably should cut down the maple syrup and use darker chocolate next time anyway. Consider it an experiment.

June doesn’t say anything, but her mostly-eaten piece means she doesn’t think it’s half bad either. Selfishly, you take pride in knowing she ate more of your dessert than Charles’s.

As for Charles, he took a few experimental bites, likely to gauge the texture, before attacking the rest of the slice.

“Holy shit, this is really good,” TK says, briefly apologizing when Eileen chastises him for language. “I never knew those Thanksgiving pies could actually be good.”

“Ingredients make the difference,” you answer. “And presentation. Charles made all the patterns on top.”

“Look at you,” Bruce says to his brother, “I told you you should come back to the bakery!”

“You have a bakery?” you ask. It makes sense, though it must also mean Charles really loves baking to work twelve-hour days and still come in to bake for the holidays. Some people are like that with their hobbies. It never gets old for them.

“Not anymore,” he says. The table becomes quiet.

Oh, fuck, did he go bankrupt?

“I’m sorry,” you say.

“Charles came back to work for me in Taiwan,” Eileen explains. “We are just subletting the space until we move back.”

You metaphorically chew on that information for a while. Bruce just said his family worked for a multinational company related to finance, and you’re not exactly sure what your parents do either. The closest thing you can think of is that they own a semiconductor or pharmaceutical factory.

“I get it. My parents are working abroad, too,” you say.

“What do they do?” asks Eileen.

“I believe they work in finance and marketing,” you answer. Your birthday gift was a necklace from Portugal and a card of Queluz National Palace painted in watercolor. You haven’t worn jewelry in years.

Eileen nods, and you have the sense that she knows far more about something than you do.

After dinner, June drags Bruce and TK away from the Xbox and back to the kitchen to clean up everything. While the three toil away, Eileen occasionally admonishes them for cleaning something incorrectly.

“You do not use soap on a cast iron pan. What is your world coming to, Bruce?”

You approach her. “Excuse me, Auntie Eileen?”

She turns towards you, again with that all-knowing gaze. “Yes?”

“Thank you for welcoming me to your home for Thanksgiving,” you say, being careful to keep it formal after threatening to shove a spatula up Bruce’s nose within earshot of her. “I hope you have a good night.”

“It’s quite late for you to be leaving.”

You glance at the clock. It’s almost ten. You’ve driven back at later times from here, but she doesn’t need to know that. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

“Nonsense. We can get a bed ready for you.”

“It’s really all right, Auntie. I have a meeting at nine tomorrow.”

“You are working the day after a holiday? You must at least get a full night’s rest before you go.”

“No, Auntie, I’ll be fine. Really.”

Five entire minutes later, you insist for the thirteen millionth time you should leave and Eileen rebuffs you even more strongly. By now, TK and Bruce have stopped washing the dishes and are watching with rapt attention. Even June is looking up from her phone to see the spectacle.

“Stay, I insist.”

“Thank you for the generosity, but I am really okay, Auntie.”

“Stop trying to argue with Eileen and go watch TV or something,” June says. “You’ll never win.”

Eileen smiles, victorious. You thank her again for the offer and decide to listen to June.

You’ve finally parked yourself on the couch. You pick up the remote from the crowded coffee table and switch the input from the TV to be anything that’s not Burnout Revenge.

Pots and pans clang in the kitchen. It’s fine. You can’t burn down a house with dish soap.

A tall shadow crosses your vision, and you turn left. Charles looks at the couch, then you, then hovers near the couch with uncertainty.

“Charles?”

“Mh?”

“You can sit down. If you want.”

He does, the cushion sinking under him, and rests his arms on the back cushion of the couch, hands dangling over. His right hand’s really close to your face. He smells like flour and sugar.

You make a mental note to bug Bruce about sneaking in new furniture as you click fruitlessly through the different channels. You haven’t watched cable TV since high school; you’re surprised Eileen still pays for it. “Charles, what do you want to watch?”

“I’ll do it,” he says, reaching for the remote with his right hand.

He accidentally smacks you in the face.

Alarm flashes through his eyes. “...Sorry.”

You start laughing and toss the remote to him. “I knew that was going to happen.”

“Don’t tell Bruce,” he says, catching the remote and flipping through the channels until he stumbles upon a medical drama.

“Or else?” you venture half-jokingly.

He fixes you with the same furrowed glare from earlier before looking away. “Forget it.”

You still enjoy medical dramas despite being in actual medical school the same way you enjoy those pulpy shows about triads and mafias and other types of organized crime. Sure, the reality is a lot less glamorous (and pretty horrific, actually), but it’s fun to romanticize things every once in a while.

Plus, it’s darkly funny to see a bunch of people on TV intubate someone because they have a colostomy, or leave stretchers strewn about the hallway like toys, or beat someone on the chest for having an aortic aneurysm. You want to point out these things to Charles, but he hasn’t moved an inch since sitting down, his gaze fixed on the screen when drama erupts between the father-son duo of doctors over a patient with lung cancer.

Only when the commercial break comes on do you attempt to talk to him. “What’s it like living in Taiwan?”

Your parents took you to New York City once when you were small, but that’s the farthest you’ve ever gone from the Valley. When they call you once every two months from the backdrop of a foreign city, you can’t help but be a bit jealous.

“It’s normal.” He keeps staring at the injury lawyer commercial.

“There’s a lot of jungle, right? And mangoes?”

“Fifty kinds,” he says. “Only a few of them are good for baking. I use Xiaxue for toppings. Most shops do, for shaved ice. Xishi is the best if you want to eat it plain. Jinhuang is…acceptable, if you need a lot of mango for pastries. Irwen…”

You turn your body towards him and keep listening as he details the ten or so varieties he knows best. Apparently the Japanese introduced a few different kinds when they colonized the island, which you didn’t know. There’s also a recent variant called World’s Number One Mango, which Charles emphatically disagrees with regarding the naming.

You ask him questions along the way, such as why Xiaxue mangos are called that (answer: it’s refreshing like snow in the summer) or if Pipa mangoes are worth the price (answer: sometimes, if it’s from one specific fruit vendor he knows).

By the end of his speech, Q & A session complete, he turns toward you, looking you over for a moment. You sit there in comfortable silence, holding his gaze.

When the commercial break ends and the show picks up where it left off, father and son not speaking to each other during a critical case, the two of you startle and continue watching.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“No, son, I’m sorry. Ever since your mother died, things haven’t been the same.”

“Instead of fighting each other, we need to be healing each other.”

Truly the finest dialogue, you think to yourself.

The father and son on screen finally hug despite being covered in blood. “We’ve got a patient to save!”

Charles sighs when the show fades into a commercial break.

You’re pretty sure working in a hospital doesn’t allow time for elongated parent-child reunions, and hugging in scrubs before operating on a patient isn’t proper medical procedure, but you know how to take a step back and enjoy things.

When you look at Charles from the side, it seems like he has tears in his eyes.

“You okay?” you ask.

He rubs his eyes and scowls. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

You get it. It’s like that time you cried watching Coco as a teenager and the people in your row at the movie theater all stared at you. “By the way, have you made castella before?”

Charles blinks at the change of topic. “What?”

You pull your phone out of your pocket and open the dictionary app again, stumbling over the pinyin. You recognize the characters for cake, which has to mean progress. “Sorry, I mean…gǔzǎowèi dàngāo?”

“Oh. Yes, I’ve made it. Why are you asking me this?”

You shrug. “My Taiwanese friend from undergrad brought some back for me and it was pretty good. I’ve been to a ton of bakeries around here trying to find one that tastes the same. I’ve even tried making it four, five times, but it comes out rubbery.”

“Did you overmix the batter?”

“Maybe?” You swipe back to your home screen and pull up photos from your album titled ‘Baking Failures.’ “They all looked like this.”

Charles tentatively takes your phone from you, still visibly confused, and scans through the photos. “You definitely overmixed it.”

“How do I not do that?”

“Use one of those,” he repeats something that sounds like ‘mo dao,’ “flat things. What you used for the pie today.”

“Spatula?”

“Yes, one of those.” He holds out your phone.

“Got it,” you say, taking your phone back. “You’re the only person who’s given me honest advice about how to improve.”

“You need to make more friends,” he says. You’re used to these kinds of comments, so you don’t take it personally as long as you know it comes from a place of apathy or concern rather than malicious intent.

“Noted.” An idea comes to your mind. “We could always connect on social media to share baking photos. No pressure if not.”

He looks at you and raises his eyebrows.

You shrug again. “No worries. I spend too much time on it anyway.”

He’s about to respond, mouth open, when you hear Eileen’s soft but authoritative voice from the other end of the room. Charles immediately grabs the remote and mutes the TV.

“Charles. You and Bruce are needed for discussion about the…family business,” she adds, looking at you.

You nod and stay where you are. “Want me to record it for you?” you ask Charles.

“Huh?”

“There’s a DVR under the TV. I’ll record the rest of the show in case you want to see the ending.”

He looks at you for a few seconds with an expression you can’t place. “Sure.”

By the time their little family talk is over, it’s past eleven. The DVR’s automatically stopped. After leaving a note to Charles about how to access it, you turn off the TV and prepare to head out. Making it out from under the eagle eyes of Auntie Eileen is a challenge.

Unfortunately, she hears the jangling of your backpack keychains and calls your name. “You said you would be staying over!”

June and Charles poke their heads out from the entrance to Eileen’s room, and you feel your face heat up.

“Sorry,” you say.

Eileen shows you the bathroom, and you pretend it’s your first time seeing the shower. An argument’s brewing outside.

“Bruce’s friend can take my room,” Charles says.

“Why the fuck would you give up your room?” June asks.

“Why can’t we get everyone together and decide then?” Bruce asks.

“This is getting too complicated. Just let Bruce keep us in his room,” TK adds.

“It’s not proper,” says Eileen.

You had the foresight to keep toiletries and an extra set of clothes in your backpack at all times in case you pulled an all-nighter at the lab and didn’t want to look like a scrunched-up piece of Kleenex before morning classes, so you lock the bathroom door and get cleaned up while everyone else is still arguing.

Anyone else might find it annoying, but you like the attention, like having Eileen persistently offer you her kindness again and again. And you know it’s a culture of reciprocity. As hot water runs down your body, you think of ways to pay her back, perhaps bringing another dish or forcing Bruce to reach a level of competence with the vacuum cleaner that doesn’t make her want to redo cleaning the house.

It’s late, you have to be at campus soon, and you’re really not in the mood to make anyone give up their rooms. Bruce usually lets you crash on the couch for the handful of times you’ve stayed over.

You step past everyone after drying yourself off and throw yourself on the couch, resting your head on the right end with your arm braced under it. After setting your alarm, you decide to charge your phone in the car tomorrow. It’s a problem for future you.

You let the words turn into background noise and your eyes slide shut.

You dream of warm arms and pastries. When you take a step, white chrysanthemum petals flutter forth.

You blink a few times, wondering what you just experienced. The same medical drama is playing on the TV. You shift your weight sideways, fully expecting a crick in your neck from sleeping in a weird position without a pillow.

Except there’s no crick. A pillow rests under your head, and a thick blanket covers you on the couch.

Now you’re fully awake. You mute your phone alarm and sit up. Charles is in the kitchen, wearing what you assume is the pink cat apron again, and he’s fussing over something on the burner.

“Good morning,” you say blearily to him before dragging yourself to the bathroom.

All clean, you pad back into the kitchen.

“Did you sleep well?” Charles asks, briefly turning to face you.

“Yeah. The blanket and pillow really helped.”

Charles opens the lid of the pot. Rich, savory-smelling steam flows out of it. You tiptoe around him to look at the contents. “Zhou, right?”

“Xifan,” he says. “But yes, zhou also works.”

“It’s been a while since I had it.” You pause. “I hope I didn’t kick anyone out last night.”

He shrugs, albeit in a measured way, as if he’s doing it for the first time. “You were asleep by the time I came out to strip all the bones last night.”

Oh, right, your sleeping arrangements. “Thank you.”

He gives you a sideways glance.

“For the blanket. It was really nice of you.”

He blinks quickly as if he’s hiding something. “It was-that was not me.” He scoops some congee into a bowl, a few duck bones with meat interspersed throughout the rice porridge, and sets it next to you. “You’ll be late if you keep talking.”

You take the bowl and one of the proffered spoons and sit at the kitchen table. “Will Auntie Eileen be awake by the time I leave? I’d like to give her my thanks for the blanket and food at least.”

Charles exhales. “I’ll handle it. Just eat.”

It’s really good congee/zhou/xifan (seriously, you’ve never used that word before), and you make sure to tell him while packing up your stuff after a last-minute look around the bathroom. You’d rather not leave a mess.

“It’s nothing. Go to campus,” he says after he spots you folding up the blanket as neat as you can get it.

You finish cramming everything into your bag. Yesterday’s clothes, your toothbrush, your phone…

Your fingers brush against a piece of paper set on top of your phone. Twelve digits are written neatly in the center. Your eyes stop at the beginning: +886.

“Charles, is this your number?”

He’s bowed low over the sink, washing your dishes he refused to let you wash yourself. “Text me once you have fixed the castella. Remember not to-”

“Overmix. Got it.” You peer at your phone, and you’re really going to be late if you don’t get on the road now. “I had a good time yesterday. I hope we can see each other again.” You can’t afford to wait for his response, so you shove on your shoes in two quick motions and dash to your car.

You don’t catch his hidden smile or the soft way he replies:

“...I hope so, too.”