We write to taste life twice

We write to taste life twice…

- Anais Nin, In Favour of the Sensitive Man

Today is my mother’s birthday. I still remember though she died some 30 years ago from her third stroke at 59.

My mom had been in a coma for about 24 hours when I was finally able to fly back to Toronto and arrive in her hospital room. My sister, dad and hospital staff said there had been no movement from her since they brought her in.

Walking into her hospital room I said, “hi mom!” She immediately sat up her in bed to reach out for me with her eyes closed. Before I could go to her she lied down back in her bed. She would never move again after that.

I felt that she could hear me somewhere in her soul. They say that hearing is the last to go. So I sat with her day after day sharing stories and telling her how much I loved her.

I watched her breath peacefully for the most part, laboured at other times and cried a lot. I missed my mom.

I went back to Ottawa to finish some urgent special events that don’t seem pressing looking back on them. I came back home from my last event around 1 am. As I walked into the apartment I heard a big gasp. I wasn’t scared as I look around the apartment for what had caused the noise.

The phone rang and it was my sister. She said the hospital had called to say that my mom has just died.

Through these experiences I began to understand the incredible power of love and connection between mother and child.

In writing my first book The Accidental Chef, I gathered taste memories that were important in growing up and becoming a chef. My mother came up often in the stories and I realized I am carrying on her love of creating and sharing food.

Through writing these stories, she came alive to me again. But with time, I now saw her in a new light. When she was alive, I did not want to be like her as I could only see the “bad” sides of her. In writing the stories, I began to uncover and appreciate the “good” sides of her.

Both were passed on down to me and I now realize that it has always been in my control to decide what traits I wish to use or not. It is a simple concept that has been very difficult for me to see.

Writing is my super power tool that helps me see the truth and gives me the courage to uncover more. What’s yours?

In honour of my mom’s birthday, I’m sharing a chapter from The Accidental Chef about my mom.

A BOWL OF RICE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

What my mom loved more than anything was food: shopping for it, cooking for others, and eating. It was comfort for her, and she was happiest and most at peace when she was cooking.

After she suffered a second stroke, she was partially paralyzed. She couldn’t see or walk well, and talked with a slur. I recall meeting her once at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, where there was a festival and food was the focus as usual.

She spent most of her life volunteering there and it was home for her. Someone had found a stool from where she could see all the action in the kitchen and she seemed happy.

When she saw me, she called out my name, waving me over, then started telling me excitedly about what kind of food they had made for the festival goers. I felt her excitement about feeding people. Although my mother and I both loved food, our relationship was complicated.

Suyeko Ishii (nee Inouye), or Suzie as her friends called her, was born in the Celtic Cannery in Richmond, British Columbia on June 23, 1927. Her mother died when she was five and her father three years later.

Their five children were sent in different directions, some to homes of relatives, one to an orphanage. It was decided that the youngest girl, Suyeko, would be sent to Japan to live with family members in the village of Shiidamachi in the Fukuoka-ken of Kyushu Island. She later referred to this place as the inaka or backcountry. It was very difficult for her to be uprooted from Canada to Japan. The culture was foreign to her and she longed to be with her brothers and sisters again.

After World War II, her brother Yosh Inouye found her and wanted her to come back to Canada. She was working at the US Army base in Tokyo as an administrator and translator because she knew English. He was living in Toronto and paid her way back.

So, some twenty years after being sent to Japan, my mother made the trip back to Canada by boat. She was always different, an outcast, because although she was born in Canada she spent her teenage and young adult life elsewhere.

She was like an issei or first generation Japanese-Canadian, but she was really a nissei or second generation. This is an important distinction in the community, which members are often curious to know. Although she was happy to be back in Canada, by then Japanese culture was more familiar to her, and she must have missed her friends.

Certainly in the years after her stroke, she longed to go back to Japan to live, but she was too sick. Suzie would sometimes wake up suddenly from night terrors, yelling out in pain. I ran to her to see what was wrong, and she told me snippets of her past. She was forced to stay in a dark house, alone with nothing to eat while her guardians were gone. They hit her. They made her work hard in the field all the time. They didn’t want her. I would try to comfort her, but then all of a sudden her eyes would become hardened. She wouldn’t remember what she had said. That was life with Suzie and her secrets, which went to the grave with her for the most part. She refused to get help for her pain, which naturally affected her life with me.

I’m sure she didn’t want to be the type of mother who let her anger and hurt from the past come up uncontrollably and unexpectedly in violent outbursts, wounding those around her.

She loved me deeply but her past was too strong to overcome. Like an addiction, she often succumbed to what seemed natural to her — which was lashing out.

I did realize that my mom wasn’t well when I was growing up but I didn’t know what to do about it. I clung to the aspects of her that I could understand, and they often had to do with loving food.

I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and go downstairs to find my mother awake with lights and music on, cleaning. I didn’t understand why she was awake, but I didn’t question it much; she seemed happy and peaceful, something I didn’t see a lot during the day.

When she realized I was watching her, she wouldn’t scold but would welcome me as if she was expecting me. She’d put on the kettle for hot water, fill up our clay teapot with green tea, scoop some cold rice into bowls and find pickles to eat. When the hot water was ready, she would carefully put it into the teapot and then pour it over the cold rice, making ochazuke. We would eat the ochazuke with pickles.

While it may seem rudimentary to make foods like ochazuke, its making and eating evokes comforting memories in me that are priceless. When you attach memories to food, all the senses involved, whether of sights, sounds, touches or tastes, brings us home, even for a moment.

I still love ochazuke, which is comfort food for many Japanese, served often with pickles and small servings of fish or meat. I’ve often said that rice is on the list of one of last things I would like to eat before I die.

I believe every nationality and country has its own ochazuke, a food that brings back childhood comfort and memories of home. Rice and pickles transport me to eating a bowl of rice with my mother in the richness of the night.

Originally published at Caroline Ishii.