White Rice and The Silver Spoon
8 Minute ReadWhen I was four years old, my father took a metal spoon and used it to shove rice down my throat. I hated the texture. The memory is vivid and has been with me all of my life. I love Chinese food and Springfield loves its Cashew Chicken and every time I order, I never get fried rice. I order the steamed white rice that traumatized me and I always laugh because I order it with a “fuck you” tone. In my head it sounds like, “Yes, I’ll have the General Chicken, all white meat, and steamed white motherfucking rice!” This is not one of those memories where I have to close my eyes and think hard, drifting on a fuzzy, euphoric cloud until I hear the sounds of screaming that take me back to this moment in time. This memory zip lines me right into the struggle. Bam! Right when the spoon is hitting my throat. I don’t remember being scared, I mean of course I was, but when you are crying and gagging, spitting and fighting for your breath, fear isn’t the feeling that burrows into your heart and stays with you. Instead, my DNA changed because I was triggered by adrenaline and fight or flight kicked in, but when you are held down by the weight of your father’s hand, trapped, unable to run, then fight is all you know and it becomes a way of life.
His rage atomized through the pores in his skin, sweating through his shirt and filled the room red. A crimson tint saturated the air covering a pea green refrigerator and manilla wallpaper with three little bunnies jumping for carrots in a perfectly repeated pattern, slightly angling down, peeling at the creases because Mom installed it herself. He held my forehead with his left hand, pushing my hair back, taut, the roots strained to stay planted. The weight snapped my neck back, forcing my mouth towards the ceiling like a baby bird waiting for mama to return to the nest and feed it a grubby worm. His metal watch band rattled and slapped against my scalp snagging strands of hair, yanking them the rest of the way out. His right hand filled my spoon with rice. The stress of growing up poor and trying to feed your family without a High School diploma, mixed with the guilt of killing Vietnamese and coming home to be called a “baby killer” was a concoction too strong for my father’s disposition.
I tried to wiggle free, squirming my body side to side, sliding down in my chair, but he was too strong. His hands had been used for much worse violence and the thin spoon was a perfect weapon against children who cried in fear. A baby crowbar for the kitchen. The spoon is just dull enough not to cut, but sharp enough to wedge between two defiant lips. Using the natural curve as a fulcrum allowed him to press down and lift. My mom was against the refrigerator, mascara smeared in warrior painted streaks just like I had seen the white actors dressed as Indians wear in the John Wayne movies my father use to show me on Saturday afternoons. She begged him to stop, over and over, and once she built up the courage to reach for his arm and try to pull it away. That’s how she ended up against the refrigerator in the first place; a mistake that she wasn’t going to repeat as she became aware that she had no sway in this particular Vietnam story. Survivor’s guilt was starting to stain her soul before anyone had even died.
There was one thing that my father didn’t count on and that is the sheer will of a four year old who hated rice. I spit every single spoonful that didn’t make it down my spasming throat all over him, the kitchen walls, the table, my mother and the dog. Sometimes, I was able to purse my lips so tight and squeeze my face into the tiniest ball of wrinkles that he couldn’t get the spoon in and the rice would spill before it could ever hit my tongue. To lose a single battle with a four year old is not something he could live with. He retreated like he was taught in the marines. Retreat to advance, adapt and overcome and then find another way. He roamed the kitchen like a rabid dog, pulling away from me to scream at her then back to my plate, scooping up another heap of the tasteless grain with his right hand clenched around the spoon like it was a knife he was using to fight a “gook”, as he called them. Then his left hand would ignore my forehead and instead, grab my cheeks hard and squeeze, forcing my mouth open. The torque of his arm on my face would push my head back and up, giving him the same angle as before, but now, caught off guard, my mouth would be open. The spoon jammed in as he screamed, “Rice doesn’t have flavor,” as if I was saying that this particular batch of rice was overcooked and not to the standards of my nuanced four year old palette. Vietnam was the killer of empathy.
My mom’s tiny, frail body was a refrigerator magnet, frozen, as she whispered, “Please stop. You’re hurting him.” She cried. I didn’t see her cry very much throughout her life. Maybe she often did in the deep, dark hours of the mornings while my father traveled and my sister and I slept. But on this day, her tears were flowing as she watched her four year old son be waterboarded with rice, helpless to stop it. And later that night, when she cleaned up the crime scene, she sat on her knees next to a pile of rice and wept and I walked over and hugged her the way four year olds do, hard, with every muscle in my body.
All of my young adult life, I told people I was allergic to rice. If I said that, then nobody asked any questions. I mean, who’s going to force a kid to eat food they’re allergic to? The truth is, I was probably more allergic to spoons. I remember the first time I saw the spoons with rubber surrounding the ladle. I was jealous and thought, “Those lucky fucking babies.” My spoon was metal and tasted like shrapnel and smelled of gunfire. I never knew how to discuss the incident and so saying that I was allergic seemed like the best thing to do and eventually, I packed it away, deep in the recesses of my mind and truly believed that I was allergic, never understanding why my first reaction, for most of my life, had always been to fight.
For years my father and I battled over the food intake as we sat around the rectangular, brown, dining room table with strong legs that could hold a grown man and a teenage boy as they clawed and fought through the adversity of the Vietnam War. Our beliefs disguised in tasteless meals and dinner time, our Battle of Gettysburg. The Vietnam fucking war. The war had the tentacles of a nuked up, radioactive, Japanese, Octopus terrorizing the once quiet town of Tokyo. The war that gave my father three purple hearts and enough trauma to slowly disintegrate a family. My mom spent the rest of her life making food with no flavor. I never thought about it until right now, while writing this, that maybe she made food that I wouldn’t spit out. Maybe it was her quiet way of protecting me. She was so narcissistic that it is hard for me to imagine, but I want to believe that it’s true, so maybe I will. She died in 2020 and so I don’t have the luxury of asking her and I’m not sure if she would have told me the truth.
When you live in that environment, your senses get heightened. I have never been in a room where I don’t know where all the exits are located and if there are any weapons I can use nearby. It might be a lamp with a huge ratan shade, but a strong base with sharp corners that could smash someone’s head in. I follow the cord to see if it’s plugged in so I would know if anything would hold me back when I went to swing it. I’ve lived my whole life ready to swing.
That night in 1976, set the tone for every dinner from that point until I left the house. It didn’t matter what was cooked, you had to eat it. As I grew older, it wasn’t just food that Dad tried to shove down my throat, but his ideas on life provided to him by his drunk father, drug-addicted mother and the propaganda that Vietnam was a war based on principle and not money. America, using all of it’s resources, including mind-fucking a bunch of poor kids to believe that a tiny little country was the first step towards global communism destroying the world, had created the Holy Trinity of American propaganda: Religion, The United States of America and Capitalism. This false God drove the beliefs in our house, and they were black and white. And just like the rice, I spit all of that shit out, too.