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My Father: The Eater, the Trickster King
A man of many appetites gets a diagnosis that demands he suppress them
The family myth goes like this: 10 years ago, my aunt asks my father for the recipe to his famous red-braised pork. He sends her home with written instructions, but the results are not quite right. A year later, she asks again, and again he gives her instructions, exactly the same as before. With one added ingredient. The next year, one added step. The year after that, one less ingredient. Ten years later, she still does not have the right recipe.
My father is a man who seems to have been made for mythologizing. A man who is too smart for his own good. Too inventive for his own good. Too romantic, too impatient, too driven, too mischievous, too jealous. He is a tangle of superlatives, and none have made his life any easier. The stories I tell of him could easily fit into the canon of trickster tales, my father arm in arm with Br’er Rabbit, Anansi the Spider, and Sun Wukong the Monkey King.
There is “My Father and the Highway Bamboo Heist,” in which after months of commuting along Maryland’s Clara Barton Parkway, with its untouched bamboo forests, my father pulls over one Sunday with an empty tofu bucket and a knife. Surely the forest will not miss a couple tender shoots. For many Sundays, he sits at the…
