OFF-MENU, Or Asian Eldest Daughters Know It Is Their Job to Feed Everyone
A mouth that begs is really just a wound, tongue fileted and flailing like a dying carp. Cut open, it yields flesh, teeth, the jangled tune of please, please, mercy. Over dinner, my girl-twin double-flame and I are commiserating about past loves, the way we used to skin ourselves and fry up the pink meat of our thighs and hands, the way we used to fragrance our clits with onions and garlic. But now my girl-twin has a man who hauled a desk up four flights of stairs, fixed its crooked drawer, set it by her window so magnolias would perfume her papers, and he wanted nothing more, he did not bargain for the token of her body. My lover feeds me soup, salmon, green tea, holds my hair back, brings his hand gently over my brow in the early hours, goes down easy like a sheet embracing gravity. My girl-twin and I are learning how to eat without being eaten, how to lean back, soften, how to be something other than a knife pointed inwards, seeking ivory, spare kidneys. We are fighting the wretched impulse to find things to gut and give away. When the food comes, we pray over our meal: may our bodies be more than empty serving bowls, our hands more than bone-fins fanned out wanting touch, may we sit at this and every table full and fat and happy.
Ballad of the Rooster and the Asian Cowgirl
An Asian Cowgirl rode into town atop a bright red rooster. The rooster was five-time cockfighting champion, but he had given it all up to be the steed of the Asian Cowgirl. Also, cockfighting was somewhat illegal in the states, and there is no recognition or respect a winner gets from a dead sparring partner. There is only crystalline pleading in an opponent’s eyes at the moment of victory. So he traded in his gaffs for silver spurs, his blood-red comb for a ten-gallon hat, his talons for riding boots. He comes from a long line of cockfighters. His father had fought in the Philippines, and his father had fought in China and India, and his father had fought in Persia, all the way back to the birth of cockfighting in the Indus Valley. Last he heard, his brother was in Canada as the star fighter of a newly-established and very illegal fighting scene. But this rooster is done leaving battered bodies in a ring, done with blood sport, done with scrabbling for seeds and spoils.
When he and the Asian Cowgirl crossed paths in a saloon (she having a spiked cider, he a corn lager), she propositioned him: Be my steed. Aren’t you tired of being a lone wolf? The rooster laughed, said, More like a lone lamb. The Asian Cowgirl stroked the feathers of his neck, and he leaned into her touch. I was never really a fighter, he admitted. The Asian Cowgirl nodded. I can’t promise you that you won’t have to fight, she said, but I promise you that it will have a purpose, and it will not be a spectacle. I, too, am a practical fighter, she said, rolling up her sleeve to reveal a silver dagger which smiled shyly at the rooster. You and I were not born as knives, she told the rooster, but sometimes we must be sharp and fast to survive.
The Asian Cowgirl knows that she and the cockfighter are a walking joke. She hears the snickers in every one-horse town she and the rooster pass through. She knows all the double meanings of riding a huge cock, of coming, of burying, of body. Some days, she feels herself flatten and liquefy. On those days, she floods the dusty roads, leaves cacti and desert flowers at every street corner—a warning sort of sweetness. She has gotten offers to be a saloon girl, a cowboy’s mistress, the prime villain of a well-known and serialized vigilante. She turns them all down. She and the rooster have better things to do: rescuing lizards from beneath wagon wheels, freeing canaries from coal mines, sitting in the vast sand and contemplating the mouthwatering sun. How does someone like the Asian Cowgirl exist? Half by secret, the other half by longing. Cowgirl mother, Ocean father, bastard daughter, fated to roam the desert alone. That is, until she met the rooster. The two are an odd pair, but a happy one, drinking spiked cider and corn lager every night over a bonfire. Chasing down stars, naming them after each other. Finding the celestial hidden in each other’s bodies. She a damsel without distress, he a steed without reins. Call their journeys fowl play. Call them an ill-conceived pun. Call them comedy, pure absurdity, the Asian Cowgirl and her beloved rooster, galloping into the sunset.