Cheap Mother by Jeremy Tsai

First runner-up in the 2019 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of Flash Fiction.

Final Judge: Brittany Ackerman

Mother Chen’s fingers ache, cracked from washing feet and floors all day, but still she hurries home from Boston’s winding streets, box of Chinese pears—Jingjing’s favorite—in hand. In the kitchen, she examines a tender fruit, flushed and pale under the fluorescent light, and presses in. It bruises. She brings it to her nose, lets its smells perfume her fingers. Carefully, she brings a knife to its skin: yellow, paper-thin spirals cascade over the cutting board. In the late-afternoon sun, the dark room feels so large and bright—even the rusty sink glimmers, she marvels. In another world, Mother Chen could be a famous chef, this dusty room her regal kitchen, like in those Hollywood movies all overflowing with shining fruit and marble countertops.

Mother Chen is not foolish, however: she sees Jingjing’s face fall with each hand-stitched dress; the smelly doufuru, uneaten, disgusting, “like worms” she’d said; Mother’s broken English; the leaking attic, their crumbling home in Jamaica Plain.

Mother Chen raises her knife to the air. In one motion, she pushes the sharp metal into the fruit’s flesh. The pear opens up like a flower, thick white petals plopping onto the cutting board. She scurries across the kitchen to retrieve a sixteen-layered birthday cake made yesterday—vanilla and red velvet, Jingjing had insisted—and sets it on her yellowing counter. As she meticulously arranges each crescent onto white frosting, she thinks back to the motherland: humid summers, crowded street-markets; Jingjing giggling at street performers; early mornings full of wonder, Jingjing peeking at the tall grasses on their way home; lazy August afternoons eating Chinese pears together in Guangdong’s sleepy countryside; the soiled diapers, the scraped knees, Jingjing poking Mother’s legs and then pretending it wasn’t her; the time Jingjing had a stomach flu and Mother Chen prayed each night to every god she could think of to not take her daughter. All the late evenings spent keeping Jingjing warm and well-fed, watching Jingjing’s face as she slept peacefully in Mother’s arms.

§

Cake and decorations finished, Mother Chen now waits for her daughter to come home and thinks of her new life in the new world. She looks at Jingjing’s school readings on the counter, all the English books Mother cannot read. How can she compete with the makeup gurus on Jingjing’s phone, all the blonde models and heroes whose faces paint her bedroom walls? She glances at the clock. The November night wanes. Outside, rain begins to fall, tapping at her window, and Mother Chen peers out at the gray sky. In the quiet evening, she chews yellow, discarded scraps of pear skin, and thinks of when she was still Great Mother instead of Cheap Mother.

Jeremy Tsai is from Dallas, TX and is currently a senior at Harvard pursuing an A.B. in History and Literature. In his free time he enjoys hiking, reading fiction, and listening to true crime podcasts.