Story published in my Stanford University Earth Systems Program Senior Capstone Project, a zine entitled foodstuff.
…
As it would happen, Bàba never planted the flowers he had promised me. But he planted something else. Soon after we moved into the skeleton, which had since grown meat on its bones and formed within it warmish cavities, Bàba brought home packets of seeds: dormant souls of cucumber and kabocha that he scattered along the southern and western edges of the house, the start of a garden full of vines.
In no time at all, it seemed, we had cucumbers. They lined the southern edge of the house immediately below my window, so that I could just see their bristling tops if I pressed my face against the screen and cast my eyes straight down. I heard the front door chime a pleasant, crooked tune: a signal that Bàba was going to harvest.
Out the door and on the way to the cucumbers, I passed Bàba’s kabocha on the west-facing front of the house. It was a shame, Māmā would lament, because it was bad 风水 (fēngshuǐ: energy; literally, wind and water) for the front of the house to confront the setting sun so brazenly. The powerful rays of a burning star would only bleach the paint on the front door and infiltrate the house with harsh light in the ripe hours of the day. If it had been up to her, she never would have bought a house facing west, Māmā said. The kabochas craved the light, though. They needed full sun to produce their sweet, starchy, squat fruit, on the outside deep jade, on the inside burnt orange that meant flavor.
Finally I arrived at the cucumber patch, into which Bàba had disappeared. Something stopped me from following him into the vines, so I lingered at the boundary and stretched my hand out instead. I loved the way the cucumbers wrapped their tendrils around the stakes Bàba had slid into the soil. With a careful finger, I pet them, counting the coils. I thought that if I held my finger out to them and stayed still long enough, they might accept me as one of their own.
…
I was a picky child, who ate few things, little of the few things I did eat, and who grew very little as a result. Cucumbers throughout the entirety of summer, I happily ate lots of. I liked them cubed in a salad with equal parts each of ham and boiled potatoes with a few squeezes of the mayonnaise from the bottle with the red cap and a generous sprinkling of sugar. They were also good smashed with a rolling pin so that they burst open, viscera of seeds and goo brought suddenly and violently from inside to outside, then dressed in soy sauce and sesame oil. I didn’t like them sliced into rounds, because then they belonged on faces, and it wasn’t pleasant to eat cucumber slices that had become warm from the heat of your face. All of this was unnecessary, of course, if you just bit into them—crisp, sweet, and unburdensome—, letting their watery crystalline freshness fill your brain.
Kabocha was another favorite of mine, but it came later in the summer and required more preparation. Māmā would cut a kabocha open using the whole weight of her body, then scoop out its dry, tacky seeds and chop its flesh into chunks with the skins on. Then she would steam it in the wok. Māmā made kabocha the way I liked: overcooked so that it started to disintegrate and form its own sauce.
In my experience, people tend to be at least mildly surprised when they find out that cucumbers and squash are members of the same family: Cucurbitaceae, the gourd family of vines. Perhaps this astonishment comes from the fact that their fruits appear to be so different, so unrelated. So I can understand the confusion—though to me, the connection was always intuitive, considering both cucumbers and kabocha are referred to in Mandarin as types of 瓜 (guā: gourd). Look no further than their vines if you want to understand their similarities and differences.
Cucumbers are a creeping and climbing vine; they root in the ground and spiral up supporting frames, like plastic gardening poles and wooden stakes and I imagine young daughters too, if they stood still long enough. Cucumbers like to sneak their thin tendrils around things within their reach, delicately, all the while stretching up toward the sun and second floor windows.
Kabocha vines are a little different. They are trailing vines, they like to crawl, rake, and clamber; they are rangy and notorious and a bit horrific in that way. They do not need trellising, but are, instead, horizontally industrious, and will invade your grass and strangle your bushes if you aren’t careful. Their vines start off plush but eventually harden and become semi-wooden in order to anchor themselves and bring nutrients to the heavy squash they will eventually nurture.
For all the work it takes for these two plants to grow their vines, they are annuals, and must be replanted every year.
The last culinary preparation I will share is hamster-friendly. Cut cucumber matchsticks and mash up unseasoned kabocha to feed to your pet rodent like I fed Bertucci, my hamster who I had gotten from the PetSmart for my ninth birthday. He had velvet fur and a pink nose. Like me, he was a lover of cucumbers and kabocha; his palate was attuned to the same things I ate, congee and sunflower seeds and bokchoy. Sometimes, I would take Bertucci outside to the garden of vines, so that he could see the world and where his food came from. We examined the vines together, him nibbling on them occasionally and me trying my best to be as studious as he but being more concerned with keeping watch for hawks and other things that might want to eat him.
…
