It was winter. The house was unfinished, a skeleton—you could see right through it. But here we were, inside of it.
爸爸 (Bàba) led me upstairs, our footsteps hollow and groaning. In each room he waited by the doorframe as I darted to the window and wiped away the dust obscuring what lay beyond. What mattered to me was not the size nor the contents of my room, but what I could see from it. After all this was done, I brought Bàba back to the smallest room with the best view of our lawn, which, at the time, was no more than a sterile expanse of compacted dirt. There, I asked Bàba to promise me that if I chose this room, he would plant for me the most beautiful flower garden that would blanket the entire view before me in splendid colors.
Bàba laughed, a little too loudly. “你为什么不挑一个大一点的房间?” (Why don’t you pick a bigger room? ) But he agreed to the promise. After all, he said, Bàba would do anything for his precious daughter, newly-turned-seven.
The promise echoed in the skeleton. I was satisfied, though, enough to fly down the stairs and back out to the car, giddy, to a waiting 妈妈 (Māmā) and into her always-ready arms.
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 side 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 western facing front of the house. It was such a shame, Māmā lamented, because it was bad 风水 (fēngshuǐ: energy) 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 were up to her, she never would have bought a house facing the setting sun, Māmā said. The kabochas craved the light, though. They needed full sun to produce their sweet, starchy, and squat fruit, on the outside a deep jade, on the inside a 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 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 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 more concerned with keeping watch for hawks and other things that might want to eat him.
Bàba planted the cucumbers and kabocha a total of three times, from when I was eight to when I was ten, beginning with the first spring after we moved into the house. Each spring, after Bàba came back from work, he would spend the remaining hours of daylight toiling in the garden, during which he might spontaneously erupt into loud, vibrato-rich song, or, catching me looking from my window while he was watering with the hose, launch into an oration: something about how squash in Cantonese was 南瓜 (naam4gwaa1) meaning gourd from the south just like how he himself was from Southern China where his ancestors once grew whole fields of produce. I didn’t know his 南瓜 (naam4gwaa1), which was in Cantonese—only 南瓜 (nánguā), which was Mandarin; the exact same characters, but I said it how Māmā said it. Bàba did this all without changing out of the button-down and ironed pants he had worn to work. And that never failed to frustrate an already frustrated Māmā, because she was the one who did the laundry and ironing, and who had gone to the pains of buying the clothes new from the mall for him to wear to his conferences.
Things really began to change the year Bàba flew away to China and never came back, the year I was ten and the first year Bàba had been around in the spring to plant the cucumbers and kabocha but not around in the summer for the harvest. It was the last year Bàba was around to loudly make easy promises and dirty his button-downs with soil and sweat. On a quiet evening that at first was not unlike the others, Māmā called my attention gently. “来, 摘些瓜 。” (Come, pick some gourds.) I stepped over the partition Bàba had built, off the grass and into the vines. Māmā and I worked together, alone for the first time, to pluck cucumbers and kabocha that were the right size from their places on the vines and bring them inside before the sun fell below the treetops and the chill of the air and the mosquitos both began to bite. In the period after the sunfall and before the lights came on at night, the inside of the house became dim and quiet. I washed the cucumbers under cool water in the kitchen sink and Māmā instructed me to use a bristled brush to gently strip the prickles off their skin. “小心刺。” Māmā said. (Be careful of the spines.)
In the unmapped disquiet of the darkening room I began to have trouble seeing what my hands were doing. While I struggled with the slippery cucumbers, Māmā took the kabocha to the cutting board and a butcher’s knife to the kabocha, and I heard its taut skin and dense flesh split open like lightning, and this is how I happily forgot about Bàba.
Toward the end of that summer, a strange woman came knocking. Māmā answered. I often hid when people came to the door—the only way I knew how to respond to my possession of a particular combination of chronic shyness and acute curiosity—behind the staircase or in the hallway leading to the old study Bàba where he used to read his papers. So I overheard the woman telling Māmā that the kabocha would have to go.
I felt like we were in trouble. Māmā took me in her arms, saying that this was not something I had to concern myself with, but the vague sense of preemptive nostalgia that came over me told me that either she was wrong or she was lying.
But maybe that nostalgia was a premonition for something else. The next summer, the summer I was eleven, was uncommonly cold. Bertucci, the sensitive being that he was, usually roused to my footsteps when I approached his cage. This time, he did not respond to them, nor to my high-pitched calls. I felt horror creep in when I reached into his den and brushed aside the substrate covering his little body and he failed to respond to my touch too, but it was my touch and not his lack of response that told me everything I needed to know, my touch that met his stiffened form and told me that he was gone. I don’t remember if I cried then, but I cried later, after I had dug a shallow grave in the hard, funky earth of the front yard where there was emptiness where there were once kabocha vines. Being much too weak, from grief or by nature, I could only manage to scratch out a pitiful divot into the rock-filled earth, one that could barely accommodate the small rectangular cardboard box with Bertucci inside. Moments ago I had taken an intermission from my shock and anguish to write his name on the box in large, colorful letters. Then, I slid his body inside, along with some of his bedding to keep him snug. I was uncomfortable with the idea that without the bedding, Bertucci’s body would be surrounded by emptiness, and that he might be cold at night—a both absurd and reasonable thought. It was all so beautiful and bleak. I thought it immensely ridiculous how one day Bertucci was alive and the next he was dead. How he could be here one second and not the one after that. I sat there in last summer’s dried-up mulch, my vision fixating on the box in the hole until my pupils began to tremble. Then the tears finally came, stronger and then stronger for what seemed like forever, until the setting sun—which had been beating mercilessly on my stinging face throughout the entirety of the burial—was gone.
I packed soil and woodchips over Bertucci’s box. Anxiety that a wild animal would smell his body, unearth him, and eat him made me find a big rock to haul over and place atop his grave. In his life and even in his death, I guess I was obsessed with making sure that he would not, under any circumstances, be eaten.
When I realized Māmā had failed to plant the kabocha the year following the woman’s visit, I thought her a villain. Truthfully, though, I had no right, having barely noticed their absence until it came time for me to eat them at the end of summer, and only then I thought it a mystery and travesty how they were not there. When my quiet anger toward my mother mellowed to a middling disappointment, I thought myself gracious and mature, only for me to become truly upset the next year when she failed to plant the cucumbers, too, and thus the garden of vines ceased to exist when I was twelve.
I see now that Māmā was too busy tending to her own garden—a garden that included her children, who demanded more of her every day—, and that there was simply too much I did not understand, namely, the sacrifices that are made in order to keep any garden alive.
In many cultures, there is a belief that daughters resemble their fathers both in appearance and demeanor. Chinese culture is no exception, and from my birth it was immediately evident that this was a truism for us. I inherited Bàba’s flat nostrils, short height, and thick hair the color of black sesame, features borne from the fertile soil of Southern China. I became heir to his fantastical tendencies, took on traces of his cluelessness and temper, and acquired his ability to apply himself unwaveringly to the subjects of his obsessions, whether they be gardens or otherwise. But when Bàba left, I doomed myself to a willful ignorance of these obvious clues. After I accepted that there would be no more cucumbers and kabocha, I forced myself into an amnesia where Bàba was missing but not missed and decided to pour all of my love into Māmā. Thus began my personal crusade against the idea that all fathers and daughters are alike. I maintained a strict and defiant stance that I resembled my mother and only my mother, telling my classmates at school that I didn’t really know my father at all in a manner so matter-of-fact that one might think I was boasting.
As the space between Bàba and I grew and I came to know more about Māmā and the bitter seeds of her past, like those bitter seeds of sweet cucumbers, I came to recall Bàba like I came to recall a kabocha and its vines, and like the strange woman and Māmā likely regarded them too: crude, raucous, and suffocating. I preferred to see myself as more like a cucumber’s vines: graceful and pretty in the way they spiraled and danced, soft and translucent in the sunlight, easier to maintain and contain. Silently, I sided with Māmā during her tense phone calls with Bàba who was thousands of miles away. I became so proud, so quickly, of Māmā for being so strong that I never let myself know the loss of Bàba.
But there is both a beautiful strength in a kabocha’s tough and tangled vines, and treasure to be found in its hard, raw fruit if given the proper attention. Only then does the adamantine exterior turn pliable and edible, its flesh turn honeyed and soft. A cucumber’s sweetness is easy in comparison, but remember: cucumbers are not without their defenses either. Their prickles, the same hair-like structures that allow a Venus fly trap to sense and capture its prey, are evolved to help them ward off predators and brace for herbivore attacks. It is not so different from how people put up spiny defenses that must be stripped away gently under flowing water.
In these two plants and their vines, I see both my Māmā and my Bàba.
I have loved cucumbers ever since Bàba. Cucumber accompanies seemingly nearly every meal I eat, and is a fantastic snack first thing after I get home from a trip to the grocery store or when I get peckish while studying. Kabocha, I am learning to love again. It is more difficult to find, more difficult to justify buying when it does make an appearance, and more difficult to prepare, requiring a sincere commitment, but the other day I was doing my shopping for the week and I saw one for the first time in a while and I cradled it to the register. At home, I made with it a soup that at once filled my stomach with warmth and joy and sadness and acceptance.
One day I will plant my own garden. I intend for it to have both cucumbers and kabocha. I forgive Bàba for breaking his many promises and Māmā for bringing the garden of vines to an end; I offer my love to them both.
After all, we all have our own gardens of vines to tend to.