What We All Long For

Excerpts from Chapter 11 of What We All Long For by Dionne Brand

# 1

Tuyen made every effort not to learn cooking and developed a dislike for what was called Vietnamese food.

"Why can't we eat like normal people?" she used to ask when she was little; when she was sent to school with minty soups and bean curd.

"Don't you see normal people coming here to eat, Tuyen? They like our food," her father would point out, but Tuyen was never persuaded. She only felt exposed in the restaurant when European clientele were present, and when the customers were Vietnamese or Korean or African or South Asian, she hated, then, the sense of sameness or ease she was supposed to feel with them.

# 2

Tuyen's favourite food was potatoes, cooked any style, but mostly just plain boiled potatoes with butter...Potatoes were perfect, neutral, and glamorous. Meaning not at all like her family. And milk. She loved milk. Despite the fact that her stomach reacted violently to it. But she insisted on drinking it. Or now buying it at least. She thought of this violent response as something to be conquered, like learning a new and necessary language.

# 3

He had no culinary antipathy registered in childhood discomfort. He loved his mother's cooking, he loved his father's cooking. He learned to cook lovingly what Carla had rejected from her stepmother...He had taken his mother's training and augmented it along the way with all of the training of all the mothers of the friends he had. His father would probably not approve, preferring the monoculture of Jamaican food, but Oku's tastes had expanded from this base to a repertoire that was vast and cosmopolitan. On their lucky days Tuyen and Carla would come home to fried snapper in a mole sauce or cassava frittes with burgers, or chicken's feet soup. Odd that the same foods they were averse to in their childhoods they now revered in Oku's hands.