Kitchen

(Dad I know you read my blog. This is fictional, just so that you know...)

According to the patriarchal discourse, an ideal woman needs to both master at culinary art and be presentable in social occasions. She always finds the idea appalling. Why don’t you just marry your cook and dress her as a social butterfly? Though from the inside she is a rebel, she still strives to be a pliant daughter, or at least aims to look like one. So there she is, one and a half hour before dinnertime, she would help her mother wash the vegetables, set the dishes, and serve one dish after another. She always waits beside the kitchen door, waiting to be called upon, intimidated by the steaming heat within the kitchen. Her mother used to be a very charming woman—petite, always smiles, naturally flirty, and good-humored. There are pictures of her 20s to prove that. But when she sees her mother’s tiny figure sweating, frying the vegetables or fish with a giant spatula, she cannot help but feel sad for her. The best of her years are gone now. Her mother is no longer the hearty girl courted by numerous suitors, but a mere mediocre, maybe even clumsy housewife. She wonders if that will also become of her. Upon this thought, she shakes her head tremendously, hoping to banish the thought away. This is not what she wants to end up, a clumsy sweaty housewife in a hopeless steaming kitchen. Some people say she looks just like her mother, while some other says she is no way like her. But in the pictures she took with her mother she still sees they have the same shape of eyes. Her mother did not have a college education. As if carrying out a vicarious wish fulfillment, she always goes to the best school growing up. She is not particularly hardworking, but passably intellectual. She lives up to the parental expectation without putting too much thought into it. It just seems like the right thing to do: go to college, participate in class, and get good grades. In her first year of college she read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and afterwards she cannot stand her mother’s tiny figure in the kitchen anymore. It is a pitiable scene, she tells herself. She does not want to end up like this. She will not end up like this.

“Tell Papa dinner’s ready,” says her mother, waking her up from the long trance. “Will do,” says she, walks to the phone. “Dinner’s ready, Papa.” She sits herself down on the corner of the dinner table, waiting for her father to come down stairs from the 5^th floor, where he has the fancy amplifiers, plasma TV and all his electronic gadgets. “Smells good,” says her Papa. She forms a smile, waits for her mother to come out from the kitchen.