Pearls for her Little Girl

My bowl is full, but my colon is not; ambrosia can’t seep into a sealed-off stomach. 

“Do not forget to eat every last grain of rice,” chides the source of my furrowed brow. 

My unclean plate sank my mother into a nostalgic reverie, and her slim white cheeks (so perfectly flat that her face looked fraternal to fried bing zi - crispy scallion pancakes) glowed as she veered into a tangent. 

“When I was your age, I had to eat and eat until the plate was spotless. Not even the essence of oil could remain”, she sighs in Chinese, tweezing the last salt molecule off her plate.

As I stirred the oil-glazed pearls in my ivory basin, waves of rice ebbed from my appetite like the sea before a tsunami. 

“I’m not hungry”, I lie, stretching the “not” from my rounded cheeks like a string of udon. I slide my bowl toward the archipelago of steamed vegetables and spilled meats, hoping to banish my overflowing stomach to wherever supermodels were molded. 

A chorus of unsurprised silence resonates through the room.

“Excuse me.” 

I rise.

In the background of our dim-lit dining room, a speaker traces my unappreciation with a song so tragic it must have been laced with diced onions. The opening strings in Pearls, by Sade, begin to warm the room in a dark gold haze that looks like a bitter Somali storm. 

The addictive sounds bless my eardrum with the tale of a starving woman - paralyzing my legs mid-step  - and lock its syrupy sentences in my head.

The song wails of a sunken Somali woman, veiling her vision until two canyons split her brow ridge. She dissects the asphalt roadside, praying for scattered white flecks against the infinite black expanse; This woman is a mother and a pearl diver, with leathered knuckles for a glove and desperation for a speargun. 

“This is how she’s dying”, searching for rare grains of rice to nourish one and a half stomachs. 

As she stumbles along the dunes, a silent whip of hunger whittles her legs to its ligaments, shoving her bones toward an above-ground burial vault. 

“This is how she’s dying

She’s dying to survive”. 

Hours pass, and between cracks of labyrinthian asphalt, she finds her jewels. Her trembling forearms float toward the unforgiving sun, 8 knuckles snapping as they praise the heavens above.“Each grain carefully wrapped up

Pearls for her little girl

Hallelujah

Hallelujah” (Sade).

Her answered prayers drum three loud thumps against my echoing ribcage. On the fourth beat, a note shatters the silence. 

I picture my stones next to hers; my wasted wardite, and her shards of jade.

One hand coddled, the other calloused.

My irises settle on the mirror next to my hip, and it’s not Kate Moss that stares back. 

Instead, I see an ungrateful young boy, shadowed by a thin pearl diver.

He examines his cheeks, and the fragile bones behind him. 

Without looking down, she tilts her chin toward his eyes, silencing starvation’s bitter taste.