LILLIAN TSAY
Eat Soil
It took me a while to find a decent Chinese apothecary in oldtown Taipei. Strangely, it mirrors the one mother took me in San Francisco when I was seven. On top of the wall is a wooden plaque with four characters. I once knew how to read them, but I no longer can. There is a row of glass jars sitting silently on the mahogany shelf. The old pharmacist with a long white beard comes to greet me as the only customer. I give him the prescription my mother used to get for me when I had a headache as a child. After learning of my requests (which turns out to be smoother thanks to the note my college provided), his wrinkled hands begin to juggle the glass jars and put the dry herbs of different colors on a sheet of white paper. From the wooden shelf, he takes down a brass scale, weighs the ingredients, and then pounds them in a bowl. As the waiting endures, I notice that the odor inside is so strong that the smell is imprinting on my clothes. It was the same odor I tried to wash away as a child. But my mother stopped me and said, “This is the smell of our home.”
Before fifth grade in elementary school, every day I drank the herbal powder with water and told myself that it was just like the taste of coke. I never expect to try it again. But since I was dispatched to the city I was born, the incessant headache uncured by any doctor in the city leaves me no choice. The pain is similar to that of twenty years ago when I first arrived in America. I had a breakdown then. My mother said those were the symptoms of “水土不服 (Shuǐtǔ bùfú).” Not adjusting to the land and water. She brought me to this herbal apothecary and spoke in a heavy accent I could not understand. Later, when we arrived home, she took out the medicine bag and put all the herbal ingredients into a ceramic pot, brewing it like a witch in the books I read at school. When she asked me to drink the medicine, I shook my head. “This is a magic prescription from our family,” mother said as she took my chin, “If you don’t like the taste, pinch your nose, and imagine that you’re drinking Coca-Cola. Then you swallow.”
The pharmacist finishes his cutting. He now turns to the drawers on the right-hand side and takes out more ingredients alien to me. I used to be curious about the ingredients, I remember that. After I became adjusted to the powder, my mother let me eat the caterpillar fungus that looks like dead worms but tastes crispy. “It has the magic that will make your body stronger,” she comforted. Back in the rural mountains at my grandparents’ place, I used to play in the dirt every day. There was once I spotted a silkworm eating the mulberry leaves. It was rare to discover them, and I took it home as a pet. I cried so hard when it died before becoming a cocoon. Soon after, my mother brought me to this new country where our apartment resided in an old building in a city flooded with signs in the alphabet. I recognized “T” for tea and “A” for apple, but back then I did not know what TARGET means. I cried out loud when I realized that there were no more worms to collect. But I cried harder on a normal school day in fifth grade when my classmate Charlie came to my desk and demanded to know what medicine I was taking. Before I replied, Charlie took the caterpillar fungus from my table and sniffed it. “Ew, I heard that the Chinese use bugs for medicine!” He then called out to the whole class, “Their mothers feed them worms!”
After that day, I ceased to take any Chinese medicine. Until now. Outside, it is already dark, and the wind is blowing hard. I find a corner and confirm that no one is paying attention to me. But then I realized that this is not necessary because no one here would take me as a foreigner. Slowly, I take out my water bottle and open the powder bag the old man handed to me. Nowadays, I heard that they no longer boil the ingredients but use a machine to grind them into powder. In the dimmed streetlights, the brown herbal powder almost looks like soil. My colleague here taught me a new term “吃土 (Chī tǔ).” Eat soil. He tried very hard to refresh my Mandarin, but I recognize none of the terms he taught me, except for this one. “It means that without money, you have nothing to eat but soil. Like I’m going to eat soil tonight. I’m so envious that you have your American salary!”
Now I am literally eating soil. I am drinking soil. I pinch my nose and take all the medicine at once. I linger on the bitterness on my tongue, awaiting what is about to come. I remember mother’s words when we both received our first blue passports, “You will take root here, like leaves falling to the soil beneath the tree.” Before she died, she said to me again, but this time only in her native tongue, “你要在這裡落地生根 (Nǐ yào zài zhèlǐ luòdì shēnggēn).” I believe I have fulfilled her wishes. All those years, my body has already seasoned too well with the land and water in my new home. Too well that it now treats the motherland’s soil as foreign taste. But maybe, maybe, I pray to the sky night, “Mother, maybe your magic might work again.”
Lillian Tsay was born in upstate New York and raised in Taiwan. After graduating from college in Taipei, she moved to Tokyo and lived there for four years. She is currently writing a dissertation on food and empire in modern East Asia at Brown University. Besides her scholarly works, her creative writing has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Atticus Review, Milk Candy Review, as well as some publications in Chinese.