Turkey and Tribulations

My body aches from martial arts, my leg feels like it’s about to fall off and I look up at the five flights of stairs that sit in front of me leading to my house. The sky is grey and getting darker. Half the trees are bare, but all the ones around the house are completely empty. A family of birds has set up their nest in the dead vines on the fence. I limp up the stairs. My leg isn’t used to bending that way from Martial Arts. I go up and look at Ma, making the usual array of food, a meat of some sort, lettuce, black fungus, and some soup of some kind. I walk in and sigh. “Hui Lai le.” “Hui…” I never really understood how to respond to that. And then I said, “Gan’an Jie Kuai le.” Happy Thanksgiving. There was no turkey, no mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy, cranberries or pumpkin pie. Just the usual Chinese food and everyone knows that’s what’s for Christmas. Something was missing. I called Chris and wished him a happy Thanksgiving, and he did the same to me, but we were both feeling… sad, for lack of a better word. It was unexplainable why we were both sad. We just were. Maybe it was the lack of friends and family around us, that tradition has made into an instinct around this time of year. Maybe it was I just needed turkey. I don’t know. It’s probably the latter. I wrote a poem about how I missed turkey. Yes, I know. I asked everyone, teachers, cab drivers, pedestrians, where I could go to get turkey, but all of them just recommended roast duck. But duck doesn’t give you the overdose of tryptophan that casts a sleep spell over the dinner table that turkey does. It’s just not the same. In years past SYA has had Thanksgiving dinners at various teachers houses, but that was before Beijing became more of a global city, rather than a Chinese one. Plus that would completely be counterproductive to why we came to China. We came to get away from America and experience China. So this year I’ll go without a Thanksgiving; I won’t celebrate the beginning of the end of the Native Americans, I won’t celebrate two Thanksgiving day Football games, I won’t celebrate a five day break from school. Instead the fourth Thursday of November will just be another Thursday, the busiest day of my week.

I never thought that turkey would be my comfort food.