Yum. The sweet smoky aroma of barbecued ribs fills the backyard and slowly drifts into the house. The backyard has uneven, rough stone tiles and a Big Green Egg Kamado (Japanese barbecue smoker) under the potato tree. Grass and roses are growing to the side. The chef learned how to cook so well from her mother. The chef expresses herself through cooking. She says, “Cooking is my way of art and creativity.” The chef is CC Zhang, my mom. CC Zhang has black hair, dark eyes, a high bridged nose, is slender, and is tall. Mom looks like a typical Northern Chinese woman. Mom has a confident gait and is not afraid to say no. She wears a smile but has little patience for nonsense. Mom is extremely disciplined and mentally strong. Before she came to America, my grandpa told her, “Work hard, and be the best.” When she came to America, she didn’t have money, didn’t speak a word of English, but remembered her parents’ words. She was an honor student at her college and for years was titled, “The Most Productive Employee of the Year.” Mom was born in Beijing, China. She has three older sisters and two older brothers. They have a close relationship. I asked, “Do you have a favorite memory with them?” Mom replied, “Oh, every day.” Mom has never gotten into an argument with her older siblings. My grandma and grandpa used to tell them to be nice to each other. They used to live near Tiananmen Square. On the weekends, they would play together in the park and fly kites from time to time. They would also go to the movies. After that, they would go to a fancy restaurant. There were only a few fancy restaurants in Beijing back then. Mom said, “From then on, I was fascinated by food.” Her cooking is the best. I have had it every day, and there was never a time where I went “blah.” Ethan’s mom as a girl in China (left) and today My mom also was surrounded by cooking when she was little. Grandma used to host parties often. First, Mom would watch. Later on, she started to help cook. Eventually, she cooked entire meals under Grandma’s watch. Mom is extremely focused when she cooks. She is very aware of what is happening in the kitchen and organized. Once, I told her, “You look very intense when you cook!” My mom answered, “It looks intense, but cooking is very therapeutic for me.” I continued to question her, “Why did you come to the United States?” She answered with a smile, “To go to a university.” A couple times a week, after Mom drops me off at school, she goes grocery shopping. She is picky about the quality of the produce: fresh and tasty. Mom often shops at a locally popular store. Her creativity is reflected when she is cooking. She almost never uses a cookbook and all is from her vast imagination. Once she said, “Real chefs create their own recipes, but a cook uses the recipes.” Since kindergarten, we have had a house rule where there is no TV watching during the weekdays. However, on the weekends, when my mom gets a chance to watch TV, she only watches the cooking show. The cooking show gives her inspiration, but she does not copy the recipes. She often tells me, “Presentation of the food is equally important to the taste because the presentation and color of the food give the person an appetite.” Last Thanksgiving, we hosted a party. All the dishes were different colors. It was like looking at a rainbow. There was dark amber, orange, magenta, green, and white! One of the guests cried, “It is too pretty to eat!” When I was a baby, my mom told me that I never had baby food from the grocery store. It was always homemade from scratch. The first time my mom bought baby food and tasted it, it was horrible. Since then, the family menu changed. Everything is made from scratch. This includes soup, meat, vegetables, and even marmalade. When I like a dish or dishes from a restaurant, she says, “I’m going to try and make it at home.” She always does it perfectly. Mom’s dishes always have a lavish look and are utopian delights! The presentation is exquisite and artistic. Dad said, “She has a very good appetite.” One of my favorite dishes is barbecued ribs, and when mom made them, they were juicy on the inside and crunchy on the outside. The color shades ranged from dark brown to light brown. The meat came off the bone easily. The taste was out of this world. Mom always cooks multiple dishes at once, a skill that I admire. I think it is very hard to do multiple tasks at once, but she seems to do it with ease when it comes to cooking. Mom uses a variety of different ingredients, sometimes making variations of previous dishes. When I look at her, I see the culture of China. Food is the center of life. In China, instead of asking, “How are you doing?” people on the street ask, “Have you eaten yet?” The funny thing is, when I am eating breakfast with my grandma, she asks me what I want for lunch and dinner. Mom knows every sound in the kitchen. If she hears bubbling and popping sounds, then she knows the water is boiling. If she hears a sizzling sound, she knows the pan is hot enough and it is time to put the food on the pan. When she smells the food, she knows the food is done. She knows this by heart, a skill accumulated through her years of cooking. Now I have a great gourmet sense of food. I can thank my mom for that. Food is the culture, and the culture is the food. Dad says, “Mom’s cooking has a unique combination of flavors, and

A girl sat on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. “It’s not fair!” she yelled to the room. “I didn’t ask for them to die!” The girl’s eyes filled with tears as she punished herself inside for saying that word. Aunt Emilia had always been so strict about saying die in her house. She had scolded her, Sarah, for a little slip, saying severely, “The Lord did not wish us to scorn those passed away with that dreadful word.” But they are dead, Sarah thought, and no amount of pretense would change that. The girl surveyed her bare little room. A wooden bed, desk, and dresser, with only a single small window and threadbare carpet, these had always been the furniture in her homely room. Sarah stood and went to the dresser, gazing into the old cracked mirror atop it. She desperately hoped to see something different this time, but no. She had the same straggly shoulder-length brown hair, pale almond-shaped face, and dark brown eyes, large in her thin little face. Sarah turned, furious with herself, her reflection, and her life. Out the window she glanced, wanting desperately to see someone kind and comforting, but what she saw made her draw back in fear. Penelope and Sasha, the chief bullies in school, were walking along the street. They were popular, pretty, and everything she wasn’t. Sarah had lately become their favorite target. She stepped away at once, but not before Sasha had seen her. She whispered something to Penelope, who smirked, and together they mock-waved at Sarah. “Mrowww?” asked Ginger curiously, seeing his owner was upset She turned away from the window in a rush, needing something on which to take out her anger and frustration. She wanted to smash that mirror and scatter its fragments to the world, on top of those girls down there, to show them what it felt like to be her for just one minute. Sarah made a movement to grab hold of it, but her cat, Ginger, stopped her with a leap across the room. “Oh, Ginger,” Sarah sighed, “you always know what’s best.” For the girl and her cat both knew what would happen if she had hurled the mirror away, and it would not be good. Lonely young Sarah sometimes pretended that Ginger could understand her, and she told him all her worries. “Mrowww?” asked Ginger curiously, seeing his owner was upset. “The most awful thing’s happened, dear,” replied his mistress, for she felt she must get the story out somehow. “Aunt Emilia has decided to send us off to live with two old people in the country! Oh, apparently the Martans are ‘kind and hardworking folks, Sarah dear,’ but I don’t want to go live like a slave of some old grandparents! But has Aunt Emilia ever cared what I want? No, it’s always ‘Sarah do this’ and ‘Sarah do that,’ without the slightest thought of what I want to do. She’s been waiting for years to get rid of me, and now she has!” The poor girl sank onto her bed, in a flood of tears. She knew it wasn’t fair to speak of her aunt like this, but at the moment she was feeling too pitiful and misused to care. Maybe I could run away, Sarah thought desperately. I could go and live in the woods like children in storybooks. Or I could simply refuse to go. Aunt couldn’t force me to. Her heart sank. She knew these ideas would never work. So Sarah just lay down and cried her heart out. When at last she tired of tears, she lay still, exhausted from crying. The sun was bidding farewell to the world, spreading the sky with clouds as pale and soft as silk. Like a glorious fiery king, drawing his cloak around him, thought the girl, feeling as though an old friend had come to comfort her. Perhaps things wouldn’t be so bad after all. It wasn’t as though she had loved the old house, for in truth it had always seemed like a prison. The mocking portraits of wealthy relatives long dead; the carpets and furniture stiff and without a speck of dust; the plastic imitation flowers, seeming to say vainly, “We are better than the live ones, for we will never wilt or die. Come, admire and pay your respects,” all seemed to be setting an example which she must follow, though she was not sure she wanted to. And as for Aunt Emilia, no love had been lost between the two. The woman had considered Sarah as a duty and a nuisance, and was constantly reminding the girl how much she owed her, Aunt Emilia, for all that had been done for her over the years. Sarah got up and went to the window. A beautiful, tawny owl was sitting on a branch. There were no other birds. Sarah wondered if the owl was lonely. But no, she thought, its song is not one of sadness. It was a song of home, a new life, and finding yourself for who you truly are. Sarah felt and saw this vaguely, though she was too young to really understand it. Perhaps if she went away she would be like this owl, alone, but happy with her life, making herself a new path. Silly, Sarah chided sarcastically, like I have friends. The tears welled up again, but back on her bed things seemed better. Maybe, Sarah thought, it would all turn out OK. The last thing she heard before drifting into sleep was the owl hooting in the distance. The sound gave her courage; she had always loved owls. Briefly, Sarah wondered if an owl would sing to her at her new home. But before she could think any more, she had fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. *          *          * Rain pounded against the roof of the car. Sarah watched the drops race down her window,

The sun rises over Chicago every morning. Hordes of commuters head to work on the “L” and just as many cars jam pack the city streets. The city comes alive every morning as people head to work and again in the afternoon as the nine-to-fivers head back to Chicago’s numerous high-rises. The sun goes down. Sleep is had, it all begins again. Thousands of people are thrown into this cycle every day. Thousands of people repeat this same day over and over again until retirement pulls them out. Of course, sometimes someone’s cycle ends abruptly. The engineers of their fate decide one day that the cycle has gone on long enough. Sometimes there is a warning. For Roy there was not. Let me tell you what I know about Roy. He was a stereotypical Chicago man, born and bred in the Philadelphia suburbs, who had moved to Chicago just for a city to move to and a ten-year plan. He was in his mid to late forties, close to retirement but not quite there yet. He went to an average college and made an average income at a run-of-the-mill banking company in Chicago. He was a perfectly nice guy and a perfect example of the average Chicagoan adult. But he wasn’t a celebrity so there were no masses that cried his name and mourned him. And he wasn’t killed in a case of racial injustice and he didn’t get slain in a horrifying mass murder or mysterious plane crash. Because if that happened he would have been written about in papers and tabloids and, even if he was eventually forgotten, he would still get recognition. But none of that happened for him. He was just an average man with some not particularly close friends, a dad, a few cousins he hadn’t spoken to in a while. There were plenty of people who liked him but not many who loved him. Sure, he had a nice funeral, there was a line of black-clad teary-eyed family members at the front of the room, most of whose biggest regret was “not getting to know Roy better.” The attendees at the service were mainly people Roy had grown up with who hadn’t seen him in years. They sat quietly and forlornly and told stories from when he was a toddler. And then the funeral was over and everyone went back to their former lives. After a few weeks Roy was, not forgotten, but also not actively remembered. Sure, every once in a while someone would think about him and sigh and say, “He went before his time,” but then the photo albums would go back on the shelf and life would go on. “I want you to write a story about him so that he will live forever” The only exception to this rule was Roy’s father. Not only was Roy his son but he was also the last living person he was close to. Roy’s father, who we will call Jim, was getting quite old and all his closest friends, as well as his wife, had passed away. After Roy died he began to muse on this. He realized that, well, he had no one close to him because they had all passed away. Roy really hadn’t had anyone except Jim close to him since he was in high school. A few years passed and Jim became more introverted. He was ninety-three when I first met him. I was volunteering for a local meal center that brought food to people who couldn’t, or didn’t, leave their houses. Most of the people I delivered to would exclaim and cry and act sincerely happy when I brought the food, but Jim always looked concerned. Then one day a story I wrote got published in a magazine and somehow almost all of the people on my route heard about it. They all cooed and congratulated me when they saw me and even Jim looked happy. However, he didn’t compliment me or discuss the story or anything. He simply invited me inside, sat me down at a table, and placed the magazine in front of him. I looked at him, confused, and placed his meal on the table. “My son died five years ago,” he said, and I bit my lip. Why was he telling me this? “He was fifty-two.” I opened my mouth, but he shook his head and went on. “He was raised here, in this very house, he went to Lincoln College, and then he moved to Chicago. He worked at PNA Bank and he died in a car crash. There’s no one alive that he was close to when he died except me. He has to get remembered.” I looked him in the eye then and saw that his eyes were shining with tears. “I want you to write a story about him so that he will live forever.” I gasped. “I’m honored, but I don’t know him, you should write a story,” I protested. “Oh, no,” he shook his head. “Trust me, it would be awful.” I began to protest again but he hung his head. I started to apologize but he shook his head. “It’s probably time you keep moving, there’s others waiting for you.” He picked up his meal and left the room. I froze as I watched him leave but as soon as he was gone I quickly stood and took a step towards the door he had disappeared through. I opened my mouth, closed it again, turned, and left. When I got home I sat in front of my computer, about to start my next story. I could try to write about Jim’s son but what I said was true, I didn’t know him. Anything I tried to write would just be fiction, not his story. I shook my head and placed my hands on the keyboard but I couldn’t seem to think of anything else so I closed down my laptop and went off to brush my