you will understand when you get older

I was running on a quiet path a few days ago when my phone interrupted with a buzzing notification. A college friend had requested to follow me on Beli (great app). I would consider them a good friend, and yet I hadn’t thought of them in a while. In that moment, I finally understood why social media exists.

I would use Beli more if I made more money, or if restaurants gave me more joy per $. In the meantime, I’ve finally graduated “learning to cook.” I enrolled myself immediately in “improving as a cook.” A few months ago, I added some tablespoons and teaspoons and pounds of sauces and beef and broccoli, moaning all the time about what the hell garlic and ginger are for. I was surprised that the result was good! Magic! The second time wasn’t easier, nor was the third time really. But now I’ve made the same beef and broccoli a little more than ten times, along with tomato and egg and other stuff. Nowhere near Visa’s do 100 things. Still, now I understand what my father meant with the frustrating answer “a little bit” every time I ask “please, just tell me how much sesame oil it needs.”

Grocery stores are as fun as Uniqlo now. Ah, yes, that would be good for dinner. That can make a nice snack. That’s a good thing to keep in the (back pocket) top shelf for when this haul starts running dry. I saw a post, “If life is a never ending loop of dirty dishes and laundry then that means life is a never ending loop of home cooked meals and comfy clean clothes.” Incline the mind towards appreciation—yes, life is a series of problems, and yes, you are also the luckiest person in the world.

I am growing into the target demographic for NYT Cooking. These are windows into other people’s lives! You learn how someone else treats these ingredients! They use methods you haven’t heard of before!

There’s a joy in merging practice and theory. 知行合一. When we were whisking the dumpling filling, C tells me that sesame oil increases the perceived moisture of the product. The fat retains moisture in meat and adds an oily, rich texture that creates the sensation of tenderness. Later, I watch C slide the salmon into the oven’s top rack. The salmon comes out with a brown and crisp top. He says this is broiling. That night, I watch a Youtube video on making pan-fried buns. After making the filling and the dough from scratch, she adds enough oil to coat the bottom of the pan before setting down the buns and replacing the lid. Ah, of course, that’s why the buns’ bottoms are brown and the heads soft. The world reveals itself to me.

I also feel my life stretching laterally into new stretches of human experience.

I remember the cultural classes in elementary school. Everyone sits around a table cutting paper snowflakes or wrapping dumplings. Arguably, all of Chinese class was cultural education. We memorized poems and 文学常识 (“common sense for literature”) and spent little time on grammar and systematically learning new words.

There’s so much I didn’t (and couldn’t) appreciate. What does tradition mean? It’s not going through the motions of folding a wonton, or doing calligraphy at the NYPL on Thursday. Feel it. The sensation of being in a long lineage of families who sat around a table putting down line after line of dumplings. Some rows are like the terra cotta warriors—varying in detail but largely perfect and identical. Others look like trees ravaged by a fire. A child asks, “What’s the correct way to fold this?” The grandfather responds, “Every way is right, but this is ours.”

I didn’t get poems until I watched an animated movie (《长安三万里》) about two poets, Li Bai and Gao Shi, and their deep and difficult friendship. Their poetry was about their time fighting at the border, watching their country corrupted and in chaos, and their other friends and enemies (friendship theory of everything). You inch closer to their emotional range when you know what they loved and hated. The author is not always dead.

I knew the labels of experiences, before I ever experienced them.

Oh, this is what they mean when they say, “You can go crazy from spending all your time with someone.” This is what election fatigue means. This is rapture. This is why people believe in crazy things and how they justify violence. This is why people have book clubs or dinner parties. This is a whole person. This is love. This is how hard it is to say something the way it feels. This is what cannot be said.

You don’t get it until you do. Is there a point to teaching poetry then? Or forcing an unwilling teenager to the table to make zongzi (粽子)? Or reading novels about love and loss before you lived enough life to relate to it?

There is. The first time you live it doesn’t have to be the first time you see it. They put the ideas in your head so that you can recognize it when you feel it in your heart. They give you a tradition so that you always have something to return to. This is another part of being human. You don’t know it yet, but aren’t you excited to?