Photo by Danil Aksenov on Unsplash
Ah Ma asks what kind of gwei-lo food I have concocted again when I brought over a warm gooseberry pie. Reading glasses perched on her nose, she circles around the table, sniffs the warm tangy aroma, digs out a dollop of the sweet and tart jelly with her chopsticks, and squints at it like a suspicious detective.
She asks if I’ve turned white inside eating American pastries instead of learning how to steam homemade sweet lotus seed pao, and what the devil is that yellow-green jelly-thing if not filled with chemicals?
And that’s when I show her my phone screen where Google translates gooseberry as 醋栗, pictures of the green translucent berries—gooseberries are not lab-synthesized or genetically modified—while she uh-huhs her way through, finally agreeing to taste a slice after I list the benefits of eating gooseberries the internet spills out: immune system boosters, cardiovascular fighters, wound healers etc.
“Hmm, not bad, a tad bitter,” she grumbles, spitting a tiny tip out on her palm, “More sugar next time, and do a better job at snipping the tops and tails!”
I nod—my heart singsongs at Ah Ma’s attempt at praise one centipede-step at a time—and I stop short of telling her I used store-bought frozen gooseberries and Ready-to-Bake pie crust when she finished gobbling the rest of the pastry, dropping the spoon on the naked plate with a clink.
Christine H. Chen’s fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Ghost Parachute, Time & Space Magazine, Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions, Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, Best Small Fictions 2024, and elsewhere. Find her at www.christinehchen.com.
