Endowed in perpetuity by the Glenna Luschei Fund for Excellence

Error message

  • Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::__wakeup() should either be compatible with DateTime::__wakeup(): void, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/www/html/prairieschooner.unl.edu/public/sites/all/modules/date/date_api/date_api.module).
  • Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::format($format, $force = false) should either be compatible with DateTime::format(string $format): string, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/www/html/prairieschooner.unl.edu/public/sites/all/modules/date/date_api/date_api.module).
  • Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::setTimezone($tz, $force = false) should either be compatible with DateTime::setTimezone(DateTimeZone $timezone): DateTime, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/www/html/prairieschooner.unl.edu/public/sites/all/modules/date/date_api/date_api.module).

Visions of Rice

Visions of Rice

Adrienne Su

Last night, eating my dinner, I saw the rice as if for the first time. It was horrible. It was supernaturally white and separate, each grain a little worm, stiff in death or just faking, to do damage later, deep in the body. It was a stranger's food, abstract and uninviting, the bowl of porridge in a fairy tale.

In my childhood, the rice cooker hissed each night in the carport, spat hot liquid, and trembled as if to run off. The rice was long-grain American, sold at Kroger in plastic bags with a picture of a smiling, dinner-serving girl with giant breasts. It was the same rice our neighbors ate in dainty portions, from plates, on the nights they were having rice. It was plain suburban stuff, and we ate lots of it, as if each meal were our last together.

Now my fiancé and I eat jasmine rice most of the week. We buy it in Chinatown in giant sacks; it cooks to perfect fluffiness in twenty minutes. It's odd that it should look strange to me now, momentarily, between bites, as if my life had briefly become someone else's, and the weirdness of rice, shoveled out of a tiny bowl and into a foreign mouth, had suddenly become clear.

In the vision, I am another suburban child of the southern United States, reading in Childcraft's Holidays and Customs the pages on Food in the Far East. “Eating with Sticks?" the headline announces, an androgynous Asian child pictured below, his/her face in a bowl, chopsticks protruding from a little fist. Millions of people in the Orient eat with sticks every day, it begins. Thinking I've seen such a person before, I turn off the lamp and go to the window, and there they are, lit up against the American night: a Far Eastern family, bowls in hands, chopsticks flashing and digging—unambiguous proof.

What I don't know is, someday I'll grow up and go to New York City, where the sophisticated people know how to eat with sticks, and I'll learn how, too, and do it in restaurants and when company comes. I'll do it without a blink, taking offense at the offer of a fork, eating hungrily, effortlessly, as if I'd known this sort of thing all my life.

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Spring 1996), p. 155

BackNext

Adrienne Su is the author of three books of poems, Having None of It (Manic D P), Sanctuary (Manic D), and Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books). Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, an NEA fellowship, and a residency at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. She teaches at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where she is poet-in-residence. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Poet Lore, and Southwest Review.

Adrienne Su