My dad's love smells like salty fish and creamy coconut chicken
A Father's Day reflection
My dad doesn’t hug me very often. He also doesn’t say “I love you” very often.
But one of the most important things I’ve learned from my dad is that love can come in many different, unexpected forms, hidden in seemingly negligible acts scattered throughout every day. My dad’s love is a constant, humming presence, which I didn’t fully appreciate — or sometimes even notice — until I moved 3,000 miles away.
Because when I was 3,000 miles away, I suddenly found that the trash bin in my room doesn’t just empty itself out every week, and that the floor actually accumulates dust and dirt and crumbs if someone doesn’t sweep it almost daily. It’s through small acts like this, everyday deeds that make my life just that much easier, that my dad shows his love for me and the rest of my family.
So rather than hugs, kisses on the cheek, and I love yous, my dad’s love is rolling the big trash bins out to the street curb every Thursday night for pickup on Friday. It’s watering the plants in front of the house and maintaining the flower pots on the back deck. It’s rubbing cough suppressant ointment on my chest when I was sick as a kid. It’s back rubs while I read a book or when I can’t fall asleep.
But I think the biggest vessel of all for my dad’s love is food. My whole life, food has been a staple of my dad’s relationship with me, my mom, and my brothers.
I didn’t always appreciate this. In my early childhood, my picky-eater years, I turned my nose up at the plates of rice and curry my dad would cook for the family, unaware of how lucky I was to have such great cooks for parents and such great meals at home.
“Eat,” my dad would tell me, between bites of his own food. You need to eat to grow big and strong, he would say. Don’t waste, he would say. Not everyone is so lucky to have food in front of them for three meals a day.
These are some of the strongest memories I have of my childhood and my dad. Feeling averse to plates of rice and ground meat and curry sauce and cooked vegetables, but gulping bites down anyway, per my dad’s insistence. Employing strategies to not-so-sneakily avoid eating the food I thought I didn’t like — inconspicuously spitting half-chewed bites into my cloth napkin, spreading food around my plate with my fork to create the illusion of having made a dent in my portion. Eating only a few bites and shoveling the rest onto my dad’s plate. To this day, I can always count on him to finish up the parts of a meal that I don’t want, saving straggling food bits from their fate in the compost bin.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize and appreciate the way my dad shows his love for my family through food, the way he shoves sliced fruit or heated leftovers in front of my brothers and me, even when we didn’t ask for it, even when we aren’t hungry. While I used to get annoyed by my dad’s insistence that I eat, I’ve realized that this insistence doesn’t just stem from his love for food, but his love for me and my brothers.
His love is that one time my brother mentioned that he likes mint flavored foods, and for months the house was constantly stocked with mint chocolate chip ice cream, Oreos with mint filling, and other random mint-chocolate flavored items that we’d never even heard of.
His love is pink cardboard boxes of Chinese pastries from the bakery almost every weekend. It’s not just eating the pastries, but sitting on the back deck all together — my parents, my brothers, and me — laughing and talking over pineapple buns, egg tarts, and milk buns on a lazy Sunday morning.
His love is the $5 Friday sales at Safeway that my dad used to hit every week without fail, coming home with arms full of cream puffs or new cereals to try or other additions to the snack cabinet, items he probably wouldn’t have bought otherwise, but they were on sale, so why not?!
His love is the countless Saturdays and Sundays spent slaving in the kitchen, preparing authentic Burmese dishes like mohinga or ohn no khaut swe, delicious soup varieties that take a whole day to prepare, filling the house with wafting scents of salty fish or creamy coconut chicken.
My dad’s love smells like that — salty fish and coconut chicken, and all the fixins that accompany those dishes — the fragrant aromas of cilantro, chili oil, garlic, ginger, and crusted chickpeas that linger in the house for days after our bowls are slurped and scraped clean of their contents.
My dad’s love looks like the emptied trash bins that I took for granted for 18 years, like dust pans full of dirt, like blooming purple and pink petunias in the backyard. It sounds like 70s and 80s music, the Bee Gees and George Michael and Prince blaring from the speakers in the kitchen. It feels like ointment to calm a cold, like a back massage after a long day. It feels like the warm embrace of a hot bowl of soup, prepared to perfection with dedication, practice, and love. And all of these things, the little things, delivered through food and household chores, say I love you better than the utterance of those three words ever could.