Flash Fiction # 173
The shortage of rice snack right now reminds me of my mother, who had her own version of rice riot regularly at home. As you know when I was young, we were living on the southern border of Mongolian steppe, where rice was considered an exotic commodity, at least in those days when transportation was not modernized yet and far away food items rarely showed up on our dinner table.
My mother grew up in the south where there was plenty of water to grow crops like rice. She hated the steppe, my father, me, cooking, and her life without rice, not necessarily in that order. Well, I don’t know what the order was since it was not something we talked about. Anyway, she felt that she couldn’t change the steppe, my father, or the fact that she had no way to obtain any rice at all, but she thought she could change me and make me an ideal daughter that a typical narcissistic mother in those days dreamed to have. And boy, she was in for a huge disappointment. I was shy, sulky, willful, and uncooperative. Other mothers could proudly show off their cute and docile and obedient daughters to others, but I refused to greet my mother’s friends or her colleagues. Only after my mother’s very obvious verbal cues, I would reluctantly utter a word or two in low voice. At the moments when my mother tried to show me off, I scowled and frowned, like I was being tortured. As if this was not embarrassing enough for my image-conscious narcissistic parents, I could always utter something very artlessly honest in or out of context, which was often the last thing my parents would like to hear me saying.
Sorry I digressed. Coming back to rice, my mother had to cook every day and she hated cooking. Well, now I think of it, cooking was probably her first hatred and my father was the close second. Every day at the dinner table, my mother wore a perpetually vexed facial expression, and my father pretended he didn’t see it and tried, with best of his effort, to enjoy his food and his liquor, which was made of sorghum and sold in the local store, with a very bad-tempered store assistant.
My father started to rant about the moral degradation of the society, the inferiority of people around him, and the cleverness of his own thoughts. As more alcohol passed into his stomach, he loosened up more and his monologue became more animated. He became happier and even attempted to ask my mother one or two questions, but my mother kept her silence, which actually screamed quite loudly in my ear. If you allow me to interpret, I would say she screamed about the lack of rice. My father and I could enjoy our dinner of potatoes, buns, corns of a typical steppe diet, but she could not. Every day she was cooking to please other people while she could hardly please herself. How could life become so horrid? She used to be a pretty girl, outgoing and ambitious, but it all came to nothing. Not willing to blame her own choice and her narcissism, she thought my father signified everything that was wrong in her life.
Well, my mother was an enterprising woman and she would go heaven and hell to get rice even in the windy cold dried up steppe environment we lived in. And she did get it, in very unexpected ways.
(To Be Continued)
—————————–
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay
Haoyan Do 