The Dumpling-Maker's Wife

Dumplings, blah, dumplings.

Pass the beer.

You caught me off-guard, off-point, off the way I know I should feel when it comes to dumplings.

Dumplings stuffed with potato and meat, daubed with sour cream, made by grandmothers and mothers for you as a child after you came home from school, on a cold winter day, and the snow was high enough to cover you to your shoulders. Or it was Summer, and you had a break from the grind of the instruments of edification, and it was dinner before the tv movie you’d smuggled on while your grandmother dozed off, before your mother came down and sent you off to bed before the news at 10 or 11.

Dumplings in soup at a noodle shop, exotic, strange, bizarre, the first time you tasted them, not used to them, not accustomed to the heat and the spice that you applied as dollop, unasked because this was your defloration before the throne of the noodle shop.

So you turned in your teens and ran into your twenties when the invite came, and you boarded your flight. You taught English, you learned to drink beer and liquors with unpronounceable names, and you took to the lessons of the shy one with the eyes like grey glass. 

Words passed, thoughts passed, feelings passed and soon you were passed into the family as one long-term customer who had overstayed the welcome and become part-manager, part-owner in the perpetual dumpling shop, with an ever made, boiled and sold sets of dozens of dumplings, with clearing of tables, cleaning of bowls, and running for flour, and fixing the fan or AC, to keep the shop going and the customers coming.

What a proud day it was to turn your first batch of dumplings, boiled, fried, baked seasoned and spiced, or oiled and vinegared, or dubbed with a bulb of garlic and a double-pint pissy-light beer.

This was before or after the formal engagement, informal arrangement, with parents notified, or not. But before you moved in and doctored the mother and nursed the elderly, and took over, one skin at a time, the making of dumplings, in the shop you’ve inherited, the fortune that you’ve made.

You achieved your Gold Star, your famed Michelin rating, your wife of the dumpling maker title. And all it took was an arranged marriage, a borrowed pedigree and a drink, or two, or three.