STICKY RICE

Mom's making sticky rice tonight. I loooooooooooooooove sticky rice!

I wasn't, however, always a fan of the Chinese risotto. When I was about ten, my dad forced me to sit at the kitchen table until I finished my plate of sticky rice. But I could not choke the stuff down. Why couldn’t we just eat hamburgers like normal people? Why did we have to have rice all the goddamned time? I heard the neighborhood kids laughing outside. All at once I was caught between my own obstinacy and a deep longing to join them. Soon my brother came into the kitchen, quite out of breath from a spirited game of capture the flag. While he helped himself to a glass of water he looked upon me with rare pity. I was sitting in the company of my dinner plate, kicking the leg of the kitchen table. He was suddenly struck with a brilliant idea: Why not take a paper bag, dump the sticky rice in it, and hide it underneath the house? A capital idea! I did exactly that. And we stayed outside and played until our parents called us in after sunset.

Early the next morning, my dad woke me up with a few firm jabs to the shoulder. He told me to go out into the front yard. I was groggy with sleep, so without thought I followed his directions. As soon as I opened the screen door, I suddenly realized why I was standing there. Some animal had gotten into the paper bag and tore it open. There was sticky rice all over the front yard! There were mushrooms on the sidewalk, bits of pork in the flowerbed, and chunks of Chinese sausage near the fence. I was instructed to pick up every single grain of rice, which in my mind, was still better than having to eat it the night before.