Indigestion

Supposedly I get my weak stomach from my mom’s side. If those relatives look at unpeeled fruit or raw celery or greasy pigeon soup noodles the wrong way, they’re out of commission for at least a week, graced with vomiting and diarrhea and fatigue. Grandma tells me our ancestors were poisoned because they stole too many apples from the Moon Goddess’s orchard, and now our bodies expel food just as we’re starting to enjoy it. “Who the fuck is the Moon Goddess?” I wonder. “We’re meant to live short lives,” Grandma insists even though she’s eighty-six. This isn’t true, of course, and I only get stomach aches when I overeat unwashed produce I’ve plucked straight from the soil. “The poison seeks out your body,” Grandma claims. “Kids eat dirt all the time and they’re fine,” I say. Everyone on Mom’s side swears by different rules, but Mom is the most practical: get some Zoltan for nausea, simethicone and maalox for the gas and bloating pain, and wait it out. Grandma still wants me to eat raw onions and garlic when I’m throwing up, and she thinks dates and adzuki beans will neutralize and flush the toxins right out of me. I tell her those are not part of my anti-fiber recovery diet, and she waves her hands and goes off about young people and their picky food preferences and how no one can eat anything these days. Now that I’m married to someone who loves cheese and spice of volcanic proportions, Grandma foretells an early death for me. “The curse, it has focused its eye on you,” Grandma laments because I’m the only one closest to bearing her great-grandchildren, but not if my lactose intolerance or diarrhea kills me first. “I’m fine, everything in moderation and my stomach has no problems,” I say, my bag full of lactase and loperamide and various brands of antacids that taste like the rainbow. To her, dipping cuts of beef tongue in chili beef tallow flavored hot pot broth is equivalent to consuming fire: burning your tongue, esophagus, and our age-old poisoned stomachs. “Fire only fuels the poison. Goddesses love their fire sacrifices,” Grandma warns. At one point, while we’re visiting Grandma and eating dinner, Mom dumps a back of shredded cheddar cheese into the soup and Grandma freaks. She starts bashing her ladle on the wall and screams in a fusion of Fujian and Shanghainese dialects, a sound that grates extra harshly on my ears. She tries to reach for the boiling pot with her bare hands, and more than we’re afraid she’ll toss the pot onto the ground, we fear she’ll burn her hands and scald her feet barely protected by her plastic, floor-slapping sandal slippers. Mom grabs Grandma while I grab the pot. We lie to her and say we removed all the cheese even though it’s near impossible to filter melted cheese from the soup. Then we send her to bed so we can finish the soup before she finds out. “Poisoning ourselves,” we joke. Killing ourselves a bit more one meal at a time, as though we weren’t already doing so by living. I don’t say this part out loud because even though I get snarky when it’s just me and my partner, Mom has a low tolerance threshold for comments that “sound ugly.” “Don’t speak like you’re going to die soon, certainly not before me,” she’d harp. I scoop out what I can with a strainer, the remaining solid and coagulated bits of cheese caught on the metal. The soup smells of cheese, but we dilute it quickly with chopped loofa and winter melon. I don’t think even Grandma’s stomach would pick up the difference.